Forensic Analysis of Video Files Using Metadata

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for forensic analysis of MP4 video files by extracting and analyzing metadata to detect manipulations and identify recording devices, using a compact feature representation and classification techniques.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel metadata extraction and analysis approach for MP4 videos, improving detection accuracy over existing methods.

Findings

Metadata analysis effectively detects video manipulations.

The method surpasses other approaches in performance.

Compact feature representation aids forensic decision-making.

Abstract

The unprecedented ease and ability to manipulate video content has led to a rapid spread of manipulated media. The availability of video editing tools greatly increased in recent years, allowing one to easily generate photo-realistic alterations. Such manipulations can leave traces in the metadata embedded in video files. This metadata information can be used to determine video manipulations, brand of video recording device, the type of video editing tool, and other important evidence. In this paper, we focus on the metadata contained in the popular MP4 video wrapper/container. We describe our method for metadata extractor that uses the MP4's tree structure. Our approach for analyzing the video metadata produces a more compact representation. We will describe how we construct features from the metadata and then use dimensionality reduction and nearest neighbor classification for forensic analysis of a video file. Our approach allows one to visually inspect the distribution of metadata features and make decisions. The experimental results confirm that the performance of our approach surpasses other methods.