A quick roundup of authentication and watermarking initiatives.

The quest for the real image: Lica camera sales re up 10x over the last decade, at the same launching a secure capture technology into their flagship M11-P cameras. The world’s first production camera to guarantee the source of images through the Content Credentials standard.  There are both consumer driven trends towards authenticity as well as standards driven initiatives moving forward.

Thomson Reuters, Canon, and Starling Lab, an academic research lab based at Stanford and USC announced over the summer completion of a pilot program demonstrating how news organizations could certify the authenticity of an image and provide legitimacy.

Nikkei Assia reports, digital signatures will contain information such as the date, time, location, and photographer of the image and will be resistant to tampering. 

The digital signatures now share a global standard used by Nikon, Sony and Canon. Japanese companies control around 90% of the global camera market.

-Canon is releasing an image management app to tell whether images are taken by humans
-Google has released a tool  Synth-ID Identifying AI-generated images 

NIST’s Responsibilities Under the October 30, 2023 Executive Order include 

– Authenticating content and tracking its provenance
– Labeling synthetic content (e.g., watermarking)
– Detecting synthetic content