A compact representation of sensor fingerprint for camera identification and fingerprint matching

Sensor Pattern Noise (SPN) has been proved as an effective fingerprint of imaging devices to link pictures to the cameras that acquired them. In practice, forensic investigators usually extract this camera fingerprint from large image block to improve the matching accuracy because large image blocks tend to contain more SPN information. As a result, camera fingerprints usually have a very high dimensionality. However, the high dimensionality of fingerprint will incur a costly computation in the matching phase, thus hindering many interesting applications which require an efficient real-time camera matching. To solve this problem, an effective feature extraction method based on PCA and LDA is proposed in this work to compress the dimensionality of camera fingerprint. Our experimental results show that the proposed feature extraction algorithm could greatly reduce the size of fingerprint and enhance the performance in term of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve of several existing methods.