The Dresden Image Database for Benchmarking Digital Image Forensics

This article introduces and documents a novel image database specifically built for the purpose of development and benchmarking of camera-based digital forensic techniques. More than 14,000 images of various indoor and outdoor scenes have been acquired under controlled and thus widely comparable conditions from altogether 73 digital cameras. The cameras were drawn from only 25 different models to ensure that device-specific and model-specific characteristics can be disentangled and studied separately, as validated with results in this article. In addition, auxiliary images for the estimation of device-specific sensor noise pattern were collected for each camera. Another subset of images to study model-specific JPEG compression algorithms has been compiled for each model. The Dresden Image Database is freely available for scientific purposes. The database is intended to become a useful resource for researchers and forensic investigators. Using a standard database as a benchmark makes results more comparable and more reproducible, and it is more economical. It also avoids potential copyright and privacy risks of self-collected benchmark sets downloaded from photo-sharing sites on the Internet.