In the era of smartphones and social media, where everyone is able to capture the moment and share it online in seconds, knowing the origin of an image could make the difference between early debunking of a fabricated story and the continued spread of a false message. In this blog post, we will take a look at the task of identifying the source of an image, a key problem in the field of image provenance analysis. Also, we will present our findings on how most of the big digital platforms modify the popular JPEG standard and how we use these traces for identifying the source of images that circulate online without any prior knowledge or assumption.

WeVerify is an EU granted project that aims to address the complex content verification challenges through a participatory verification approach, open-source algorithms, low-overhead human-in-the-loop machine learning and intuitive visualizations. The MeVer team leads the ‘Cross-modal Disinformation Detection and Content Verification’ work package and in collaboration with the University of Sheffield (USFD) have developed tools that will bring together features from text, images and videos to tackle the challenge of cross-modal disinformation detection and content verification.