A novel image filtering approach for sensor fingerprint estimation in source camera identification

Photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU) noise has been well established as a reliable fingerprint of imaging sensors for source camera identification and other forensic applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel denoising method for PRNU noise extraction that considerably outperforms the existing techniques. The rationale is to use as little as one adjacent pixel in spatial domain filtering to suppress the pixel-to-pixel correlation in the estimation of the (supposedly white) PRNU noise. Experimental results are presented based on an image database of ten cameras of different models and makes. These results are embodied in the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of source camera identification.