Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2023, Engineering

Given a set of video imagery from unknown device provenance, video-based source camera identification (V-SCI) refers to a task of identifying which device collected the imagery. V-SCI techniques predominantly leverage photo response non-uniformity (PRNU) patterns extracted from digital video for device identification decisions. PRNU patterns function as device fingerprints and SCI methods using PRNU from digital still imagery (I-SCI) are relatively mature; however, advancements in video processing, namely electronic image stabilization (EIS) algorithms, degrade video extracted PRNU distinctiveness yielding a significant obstacle toward extending I-SCI performance to EIS processed video datasets. We provide a new, more relevant PRNU dataset, UDAYTON23VSCI, for V-SCI benchmarking in contrast to current publicly available datasets. To address the EIS V-SCI challenge, we present a data-driven approach to exploit PRNU signals derived from EIS video via ``device-specific'' neural networks implemented with a novel PRNU image training and transfer learning strategy. Results implementing our device-specific network approach on UDAYTON23VSCI and a leading publicly available dataset confirm the advantages of our approach over state of the art SCI methods. We provide a new PRNU computation approach via Log-noise PRNU estimation which overcomes multiplicative noise constraints inherent to PRNU patterns in imagery. We show our Log-noise PRNU estimation approach outperforms the current widely accepted PRNU estimation approach based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) in V-SCI task thus eliminating the need for MLE in computing PRNU. Lastly, by removing MLE PRNU computation requirement, we show our Log-noise PRNU estimation approach is a key contribution toward realizing a fully data driven end-to-end (E2E) network design for tackling EIS V-SCI.

Committee: Keigo Hirakawa (Advisor); Barath Narayanan (Committee Member); Partha Banerjee (Committee Member); Vijayan Asari (Committee Member) Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Electrical Engineering