Video Liveness for Citizen Journalism: Attacks and Defenses

The impact of citizen journalism raises important video integrity and credibility issues. In this article, we introduce Vamos, the first user transparent video “liveness” verification solution based on video motion, that accommodates the full range of camera movements, and supports videos of arbitrary length. Vamos uses the agreement between video motion and camera movement to corroborate the video authenticity. Vamos can be integrated into any mobile video capture application without requiring special user training. We develop novel attacks that target liveness verification solutions. The attacks leverage both fully automated algorithms and trained human experts. We introduce the concept of video motion categories to annotate the camera and user motion characteristics of arbitrary videos. We show that the performance of Vamos depends on the video motion category. Even though Vamos uses motion as a basis for verification, we observe a surprising and seemingly counter-intuitive resilience against attacks performed on relatively “stationary” video chunks, which turn out to contain hard-to-imitate involuntary movements. We show that overall the accuracy of Vamos on the task of verifying whole length videos exceeds 93 percent against the new attacks.