Digital cameras have unique “noise” fingerprints?
Here’s a recent breakthrough in CSI. A scientist at SUNY Binghamton claims that he can tell which camera took any given photo by matching the photo’s unique “weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity.”
Like actual fingerprints, the digital “noise” in original images is stochastic in nature – that is, it contains random variables – which are inevitably created during the manufacturing process of the camera and its sensors. This virtually ensures that the noise imposed on the digital images from any particular camera will be consistent from one image to the next, even while it is distinctly different.
In preliminary tests, Fridrich’s lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.
100 percent accuracy? That’s just freaky. Does that mean I can’t snap pictures of my bathing neighbors and get away with it anymore? Not that I do! 
April 26th, 2006 at 5:18am
That sounds really cool, and kind of freaky at the same time o.O; But since they only proved it with 9 cameras, I have trouble believing that it’s true for every camera. They’re bound to have duplicate patterns.
April 26th, 2006 at 1:52pm
It’s the beginning of something big though, less room for privacy each day.
April 27th, 2006 at 10:00am
For some reason I have to say that the noise may be specific for a certian model and manfacture of the camera, but two identical cameras are bound to have very simmilar noises. Besides this could be eliminated with a tad of Photoshop/Gimp photo manipulation, they would be able to tell that you photo manipulated it but it would be much more difficult to tace down to a single camera, interesting though.
February 5th, 2007 at 9:53pm
I would not be surprised that after carefull analisis it shows that the noise represents the serial number of the camera and name of manufacturer