A Component Estimation Framework for Information Forensics

With a rapid growth of imaging technologies and an increasingly widespread usage of digital images and videos for a large number of high security and forensic applications, there is a strong need for techniques to verify the source and integrity of digital data. Component forensics is new approach for forensic analysis that aims to estimate the algorithms and parameters in each component of the digital device. In this paper, we develop a novel theoretical foundation to understand the fundamental performance limits of component forensics. We define formal notions of identifiability of components in the information processing chain, and present methods to quantify the accuracies at which the component parameters can be estimated. Building upon the proposed theoretical framework, we devise methods to improve the accuracies of component parameter estimation for a wide range of forensic applications.