Image Evolution Analysis Through Forensic Techniques

Images have always played a key role as a mean to convey information, mainly because of their immediacy. Nowadays, digital images can be taken, processed and distributed in several easy ways, generating more and more entities of the same picture, as a sort of "organisms" that evolve over time. Thus, several issues arise about the Intellectual Property Rights and the Authenticity of digital images, increasing the interest in the reconstruction of their evolution. In this Thesis, scientific methods, borrowed from Image Forensics, have been proposed to reconstruct the evolution of digital pictures, when they suffered chains of processing operators or photomontages. Tools have been developed to recover the phylogeny of a set of related images as well as to analyze the evolution of a single picture, without any information about parenting images.