Adobe eyes fraud-busting tools for Photoshop
In the near future, it could be a lot easier to see if those pictures of the person you've been talking to on Match.com have been retouched.
Adobe Systems' Advanced Technology lab is working on plug-ins for Photoshop that would detect whether a photo has been tampered with, according to an Adobe representative. So far, the company has two plug-ins that are in a fairly advanced stage of development. Adobe is working with Dartmouth professor Hany Farid, an expert in photo fraud detection.
One tool from Adobe, called Clone Tool Detector, determines whether a section in a picture, such as a patch of sand or a field of grass, has been recopied from another part of the picture. Last year, Reuters admitted that a photographer cloned a smoke plume in a shot of wartime Beirut. The tool can't ascertain with absolute certainty whether two items, say a pair of clouds or other images, have been cloned, but it will say that the two images are "improbably similar."