Mathematics Seminar: Connecting Forensics and Linear Algebra

Lecture by Donna Beers of Simmons College

Just as you can alter pictures to make yourself look more attractive, so, too, politicians, advertisers, and others with particular agendas are using digital imaging tools to manipulate photos to create false impressions. Determining whether a photo has been doctored is just one of the many questions that photo forensics tries to answer.

The good news is that linear algebra offers powerful tools for carrying out digital photo forensics. In this talk we will explore two applications: detection of explicit images through use of the RGB color model and image reconstruction from compressed data files using the Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform