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by oropolo 1455 days ago
Which leads to the question: will cameras be "fingerprinted" before being sold?
3 comments

It would be far easier to force phone and camera manufacturers to “embed” a fingerprint in the photo than to measure every sensor.

Also these fingerprints in reality are very flaky and the higher the quality of the sensor the less of a fingerprint there is to work with.

The fingerprints are also dependent on specific operating conditions which can change with firmware and operating parameters (e.g. digital zoom / cropping) as well as environmental conditions such as light levels and even temperature.

camera manufacturers already put unique QR like barcode on the sensors for lot tracking and such.
Slapping a barcode on a sensor is a lot less involved than using it to take some careful measurements and then storing and retaining the results.
...and also leads would-be anonymous image-posters to increase the noise-floor of their photographs.
It makes more sense to just denoise.
Most phones do that for you anyhow. Unless there are serious defects in the sensor that would probably mean it would fail QA even for bargain bin phones the amount of “AI” post processing that phones do these days is probably sufficient to erase any sensor fingerprint.

Even with DSLRs and RAW files you often don’t get a RAW output from the sensor all of them do their own “color science” magic and other alterations like denoising too even on the rawest of the RAW settings.

RAW files today just mean that the files are uncompressed or the least compressed since there might be some compression/downsampling happening at readout anyhow and that you get a ton of metadata that can be used by a photo editing app to better work with the image.

Or to just dither the hell out of your image.

Luminance sensitivity information could probably be most-easily detected in the dark areas of an image. So just crush those areas.

I suspect the more you think about this problem the more the answer becomes: Compress your image in order to remove information density.

Still, a determined adversary might find this information discernable over a long enough series of images.

digital cameras have extensive internal IDs that are transferred into the image file -- this varies a lot by manufacturer and model

edit https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=exif

The file, but not the image. Also easily removable, although companies have been clearly encouraged to make this difficult in mainstream software and to set maximal defaults. Probably doesn't take much encouragement, because the more metadata, the more automagic.