Identifying source camera using guided image estimation and block weighted average

Sensor pattern noise (SPN) has been widely used in source camera identification. However, the SPN extracted from natural image may be contaminated by its content and eventually introduce side effect to the identification accuracy. In this paper, an effective source camera identification scheme based on guided image estimation and block weighted average is proposed. Before the SPN extraction, an adaptive SPN estimator based on image content is implemented to reduce the influence of image scene and improve the quality of the SPN. Furthermore, a novel camera reference SPN construction method is put forward by using some ordinary images, instead of the blue sky images in the previous schemes, and a block weighted average approach is used to suppress the influence of the image scenes in the reference SPN. Experimental results and analysis indicate that the proposed method can effectively identify the source of the natural image, especially in actual forensics environment with a small number of images. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.