Noise-Coded Illumination for Forensic and Photometric Video Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Michael, Peter F., Hao, Zekun, Belongie, Serge, Davis, Abe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Michael, Peter F.
Hao, Zekun
Belongie, Serge
Davis, Abe
author_facet Michael, Peter F.
Hao, Zekun
Belongie, Serge
Davis, Abe
contents The proliferation of advanced tools for manipulating video has led to an arms race, pitting those who wish to sow disinformation against those who want to detect and expose it. Unfortunately, time favors the ill-intentioned in this race, with fake videos growing increasingly difficult to distinguish from real ones. At the root of this trend is a fundamental advantage held by those manipulating media: equal access to a distribution of what we consider authentic (i.e., "natural") video. In this paper, we show how coding very subtle, noise-like modulations into the illumination of a scene can help combat this advantage by creating an information asymmetry that favors verification. Our approach effectively adds a temporal watermark to any video recorded under coded illumination. However, rather than encoding a specific message, this watermark encodes an image of the unmanipulated scene as it would appear lit only by the coded illumination. We show that even when an adversary knows that our technique is being used, creating a plausible coded fake video amounts to solving a second, more difficult version of the original adversarial content creation problem at an information disadvantage. This is a promising avenue for protecting high-stakes settings like public events and interviews, where the content on display is a likely target for manipulation, and while the illumination can be controlled, the cameras capturing video cannot.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23002
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Noise-Coded Illumination for Forensic and Photometric Video Analysis
Michael, Peter F.
Hao, Zekun
Belongie, Serge
Davis, Abe
Graphics
Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The proliferation of advanced tools for manipulating video has led to an arms race, pitting those who wish to sow disinformation against those who want to detect and expose it. Unfortunately, time favors the ill-intentioned in this race, with fake videos growing increasingly difficult to distinguish from real ones. At the root of this trend is a fundamental advantage held by those manipulating media: equal access to a distribution of what we consider authentic (i.e., "natural") video. In this paper, we show how coding very subtle, noise-like modulations into the illumination of a scene can help combat this advantage by creating an information asymmetry that favors verification. Our approach effectively adds a temporal watermark to any video recorded under coded illumination. However, rather than encoding a specific message, this watermark encodes an image of the unmanipulated scene as it would appear lit only by the coded illumination. We show that even when an adversary knows that our technique is being used, creating a plausible coded fake video amounts to solving a second, more difficult version of the original adversarial content creation problem at an information disadvantage. This is a promising avenue for protecting high-stakes settings like public events and interviews, where the content on display is a likely target for manipulation, and while the illumination can be controlled, the cameras capturing video cannot.
title Noise-Coded Illumination for Forensic and Photometric Video Analysis
topic Graphics
Cryptography and Security
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23002