Multimedia file forensics system exploiting file similarity search

With the fast increase of multimedia contents, efficient forensics investigation methods for multimedia files have been required. In multimedia files, the similarity means that the identical media (audio and video) data are existing among multimedia files. This paper proposes an efficient multimedia file forensics system based on file similarity search of video contents. The proposed system needs two key techniques. First is a media-aware information detection technique. The first critical step for the similarity search is to find the meaningful keyframes or key sequences in the shots through a multimedia file, in order to recognize altered files from the same source file. Second is a video fingerprint-based technique (VFB) for file similarity search. The byte for byte comparison is an inefficient similarity searching method for large files such as multimedia. The VFB technique is an efficient method to extract video features from the large multimedia files. It also provides an independent media-aware identification method for detecting alterations to the source video file (e.g., frame rates, resolutions, and formats, etc.). In this paper, we focus on two key challenges: to generate robust video fingerprints by finding meaningful boundaries of a multimedia file, and to measure video similarity by using fingerprint-based matching. Our evaluation shows that the proposed system is possible to apply to realistic multimedia file forensics tools.