Towards the verification of image integrity in online news

Abstract

The widespread of social networking services allows users to share and quickly spread an enormous amount of digital contents. Currently, a low level of security and trustworthiness is applied to such information, whose reliability cannot be taken for granted due to the large availability of image editing software which allow any user to easily manipulate digital contents. This has a huge impact on the deception of users, whose opinion can be seriously influenced by altered media. In this work, we face the challenge of verifying online news by analyzing the images related to the particular news article. Our goal is to create an empirical system which helps in verifying the consistency of visually and semantically similar images used within different news articles on the same topic. Given a certain news online, our system identifies a set of images connected to the same topic and presenting common visual elements, which can be successively compared with the original ones and analyzed in order to discover possible inconsistencies also by means of multimedia forensics tools.