Digital Single Lens Reflex Camera Identification From Traces of Sensor Dust

Digital single lens reflex cameras suffer from a well-known sensor dust problem due to interchangeable lenses that they deploy. The dust particles that settle in front of the imaging sensor create a persistent pattern in all captured images. In this paper, we propose a novel source camera identification method based on detection and matching of these dust-spot characteristics. Dust spots in the image are detected based on a (Gaussian) intensity loss model and shape properties. To prevent false detections, lens parameter-dependent characteristics of dust spots are also taken into consideration. Experimental results show that the proposed detection scheme can be used in identification of the source digital single lens reflex camera at low false positive rates, even under heavy compression and downsampling.