Introduction to Special Issue on “Recent trends in Multimedia Forensics”

Abstract

Multimedia forensics is a subject area which is the need of the hour in this modern era of media-manipulation and generation of fake images/videos assisted with artificial intelligence (AI) models. With the ubiquitous expansion of internet enabled devices, there is a humungous amount of data available to the perusal of forensic experts. This data comprises of audio, video, images, text or a mix of those. Hence multimedia forensics, which involves a set of scientific techniques to collect, scrutinize and analyze this digital content, becomes highly imperative. The increasing threat of compelling media manipulations through machine learning-based technologies is making the situation more alarming. The most common instances are generative adversarial networks (GANs) (to generate artificial yet realistic images/videos) and DeepFake algorithms (to swap faces and expressions in videos). Furthermore, the ease of getting these manipulations done has lowered the skill required from the attacker’s end, which has intensified the problem manifold. This special issue captures a few recent outstanding works beyond trivial research results in order to push the border of the state-of-the-art and record the developments on this subject of research.