SPS-IFS TC Webinar: Scientific Integrity Verification Through Image Forensics
Date: 6 July 2023
Time: 10:00 AM EDT (Local time)
Presenter(s): Dr. Daniel Moreira
SPS-IFS (Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee) Webinar
Abstract
Many images issued in scientific articles are reused, retouched, or composed to enhance the quality of the publications. Most of these edits are benign and aim at helping the reader better to understand the outcomes of the study at hand. However, there are also edits comprising scientific misconduct, which undermine the integrity of the presented research and aim at deceiving the reader. Deciding the legitimacy of edits made to scientific images is an open problem that no current technology can perform satisfactorily in a fully automated fashion. It thus remains to the human experts the task to inspect the images as part of the peer-review process. Nonetheless, they do not need to be forsaken. Tools from media forensics can enter the scene to help them execute the tedious parts and provide more information for faster and more accurate decisions. In this talk, I will describe our recent efforts to make image analysis tools available to reviewers and editors in a principled way. The endeavor has involved not only the study, development, and deployment of techniques, but also the collection of a dataset of scientific papers as a benchmark, which contains real cases of articles retracted due to problems with images.
Biography
Daniel Moreira is a computer scientist who works as an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago, USA.
He investigates the application of techniques from the fields of Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Media Forensics, and Biometrics to make our society better.
