# U-Phylogeny: Undirected Provenance Graph Construction in the Wild

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for constructing undirected provenance graphs in multimedia phylogeny, effectively handling complex forged images with multiple donors without strict assumptions.

## Contribution

It presents a novel undirected graph construction algorithm for multiple parenting phylogeny that uses robust keypoints and geometric consistency checks, addressing limitations of prior solutions.

## Key findings

- Effective in real-world cases with and without distractors
- Handles multiple donors in forged images
- Uses geometric filtering for better match selection

## Abstract

Deriving relationships between images and tracing back their history of modifications are at the core of Multimedia Phylogeny solutions, which aim to combat misinformation through doctored visual media. Nonetheless, most recent image phylogeny solutions cannot properly address cases of forged composite images with multiple donors, an area known as multiple parenting phylogeny (MPP). This paper presents a preliminary undirected graph construction solution for MPP, without any strict assumptions. The algorithm is underpinned by robust image representative keypoints and different geometric consistency checks among matching regions in both images to provide regions of interest for direct comparison. The paper introduces a novel technique to geometrically filter the most promising matches as well as to aid in the shared region localization task. The strength of the approach is corroborated by experiments with real-world cases, with and without image distractors (unrelated cases).