Large-Scale Image Phylogeny: Tracing Image Ancestral Relationships

Similar to organisms that evolve in biology, a document can change slightly overtime, and each new version may, in turn, generate other versions. Multimedia phylogeny investigates the history and evolutionary process of digital objects and includes finding the causal and ancestral document relationships, source of modifications, and the order and transformations that originally created the set of near duplicates. Multimedia phylogeny has direct applications in security, forensics, and information retrieval. This article explores the phylogeny problem for near-duplicate images in large-scale scenarios and present solutions that have straightforward extension to other media such as videos. Experiments with approximately 2 million test cases (with synthetic and real data) show that the proposed methods automatically build image phylogeny trees from partial information about the near duplicates, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the whole process, and represent a step forward in determining causal relationships between digital images overtime.