Is Seeing Believing? Video Forgery through Object-based Editing Techniques

Videos are generally considered to provide stronger forensic evidences than still images. This is why surveillance video is often used in investigations and information-gathering as an important and credible piece of evidence. It is evident that the ever-increasing capabilities of digital video processing have made surveillance video easy to operate and can even change images to one’s liking. Although video editing software (such as Adobe Premiere) can be used to easily tamper with digital video without leaving visible clues, it requires proficient editing techniques and processing time. This study focuses on object-based video editing technology. It shows how this object-based video editing technology could adjust the spatial domain properties of objects in the video, such as deletion, displacement, and copying. It is also possible to adjust the object in the time domain so that the temporal relationship between objects changes or even reverses. These features show the potential problems of video as evidence. On the other hand, the same technology can be applied positively to eliminate unwanted objects in the video to make the video smoother, clearer and more accurate.