Adobe wants to help identifying altered pictures

It all started with a scandal that involved Reuters last year. The agency had put online a picture of Beyrouth with smoke coming from the ground following an air raid, but at least some of the smoke had been added by the photographer. Adobe is reportedly working on photoshop plug-ins allowing the pictures' authenticity to be validated, so that this kind of event does not happen again. This will be done in two ways:
- the picture will be marked with the serial number of the camera that took it. Adobe is working on this with Canon.
- the second project is subtler but more complex to implement. It's based on algorithms having the ability to detect a modified image by showing an abnormal discontinuity in the successive pixels it is made of.
What's left until these plugins are out is to completely suppress the false positives, still affecting 10% of the pictures, making them appear as retouched when in fact they are not. According to Adobe, this will take one to three year.