The days of being duped by a beautifully doctored Photoshop image are numbered, as Adobe have developed software to help detect such forgeries.

It’s rather ironic that the company that the forefront of such digital manipulation through their ubiquitous Photoshop program have now created the tools to counter it – or at least detect whether or not such image distortion has occurred.

A research paper published by the company, ‘Learning Rich Features for Image Manipulation Detection’ outlines the process.

“Even with careful inspection, humans find it difficult to recognise the tampered regions”, reads the paper. “As a result, distinguishing authentic images from tampered images has become increasingly challenging. The emerging research focusing on this topic — image forensics — is of great importance because it seeks to prevent attackers from using their tampered images for unscrupulous business or political purposes.”

They point out this new technology, image manipulation detection, is “different from traditional semantic object detection because it pays more attention to tampering artifacts than to image content.”

The below graphic shows how this is done (kinda).

So far the software has not been released, however its applications could be very interesting: whether integrated into Google searches, available as a standalone app or integrated into Adobe’s own Creative Cloud suite.

The article was originally published on Brag Magazine