Eye specular highlights telltales for digital forensics: A machine learning approach

Among the possible forms of photographic fabrication and manipulation, there is an increasing number of composite pictures containing people. With such compositions, it is very common to see politicians depicted side-by-side with criminals during election campaigns, or even Hollywood superstars relationships being wrecked by allegedly affairs depicted in gossip magazines. Thinking about this problem, in this paper we analyze telltales obtained from highlights in the eyes of every person standing in a picture in order to decide whether or not those people were really together at the moment of such image acquisition. We validate our approach with a data set containing realistic photographic compositions, as well as authentic unchanged pictures. As a result, our proposed extension improves the classification accuracy of the state-of-art solution in more than 20%.