Could you please tell me if there was a feature to identify a digital image as having not been altered? Thanks in advance.

-- Tony Woo (tony.woo@usa.net), September 18, 1999

Answers

There are technologies that let you apply a "digital watermark" to an image, and that will let you tell if it was altered *after* that process was initially done. Not much to tell if a generic image was altered or not. Also depends on whether you're trying to determine authenticity to the standard of a legal proof, or just for curiosity's sake. If only the later, and if the image came from a digital camera, most (all?) image editors wipe out the "EXIF" headers the digicams put on files to store exposure time, etc. If you use a program that can read the headers and find none on an image that supposedly came from a digicam, you'll know something is (or may be) up.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), September 19, 1999.

Epson may have what you are looking for. It is called Image Authentication System You can read more about it at: http://www.epson.com/cam_scan/cam_extras/ias/

-- Bob G. (rgreg88721@hotmail.com), September 20, 1999.