Wallcamera: Reinventing the Wheel?

TL;DR

The paper reveals that the Wallcamera's core idea is similar to earlier differential imaging forensics, but its main contribution is achieving finer activity recognition and expanding forensic applications like personal info recovery and tampering detection.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Wallcamera's innovation lies in finer activity recognition than previous DIF methods and broadens forensic applications beyond prior capabilities.

Findings

Wallcamera's core is similar to earlier DIF techniques

Achieves finer activity recognition than DIF

Enables recovery of personal info and tampering detection

Abstract

Developed at MIT CSAIL, the Wallcamera has captivated the public's imagination. Here, we show that the key insight underlying the Wallcamera is the same one that underpins the concept and the prototype of differential imaging forensics (DIF), both of which were validated and reported several years prior to the Wallcamera's debut. Rather than being the first to extract and amplify invisible signals -- aka latent evidence in the forensics context -- from wall reflections in a video, or the first to propose activity recognition following that approach, the Wallcamera's actual innovation is achieving activity recognition at a finer granularity than DIF demonstrated. In addition to activity recognition, DIF as conceived has a number of other applications in forensics, including 1) the recovery of a photographer's personal identifiable information such as body width, height, and even the color of their clothing, from a single photo, and 2) the detection of image tampering and deepfake videos.