Identification of digital radiography image source based on digital radiography pattern noise recognition

In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary work which focuses on identifying the system one Digital Radiography (DR) image has been produced by. To do so, we adapt one solution proposed for digital camera devices where the photo response non-uniformity noise of charge coupled device sensors is used as camera fingerprint. In particular, we show that DR acquisition systems leave a similar Digital Radiography Pattern Noise (DRPN) that can be used as fingerprint. In order to extract this DRPN and due to the nature of DR images, we further propose to take advantage of contourlet filtering. Experiments conducted on images issued from 7 different DR systems show first it is possible to identify with good accuracy the origin of one DR image and, second, that contourlet filtering leads to better detection performance than commonly used approaches based on wavelet or BM3D filtering.