Pixels prosecute pornographers

Child pornographers will soon have a harder time escaping prosecution thanks to a new technology in development at

, State University of New York, that can reliably link digital images to the camera with which they were taken.

"The defence in these kind of cases would often be that the images were not taken by this person's camera or that the images are not of real children," said Jessica Fridrich, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. "Sometimes child pornographers will even cut and paste an image of an adult's head on the image of a child to try to avoid prosecution.

"But if it can be shown that the original images were taken by the person's cell phone or camera, it becomes a much stronger case than if you just have a bunch of digital images that we all know are notoriously easy to manipulate."

Fridrich and two members of her Binghamton University research team – Jan Lukas and Miroslav Goljan – are co inventors of the new technique, which can also be used to detect forged images.