A South Korean research team has developed a high-performance software (SW) that is able to easily detect computer-manipulated pictures or video materials. This will be the first time that such software will be commercialized in South Korea and the second time globally.
KAIST (President Shin Sung-chul) announced on Tuesday that a research team led by Professor Lee Heung-kyu of School of Computing used artificial neural network in order to develop “KAICATCH” that has a wide-range capability to detect whether digital pictures are real or not.
The research team put out a result from its research after carefully analyzing about 300,000 actual distributed images, forensic images based on characteristics and neural networks, and video materials from experiments that it had collected since June of 2015.
It focused on a technology that organically combines various alteration detection functions and it conducted a research that focused on dividing and organizing various alteration methods and detecting them. As a result, it was able to find out whether actual alteration took place even though it could not specify the type of alteration.

Photo Image
<Red, blue, and yellow squares captured by KAICATCH show areas that are different from original pictures>

Its SW is able to process uncompressed and lossless compression formats such as BMP, TIF, TIFF, and PNG, around 50 standardized quantization tables, and more than 1,000 non-standardized quantization table-based JPEG images.
It is made up of two different machine learning engines that have various ways to detect alterations and are able to look for areas that have been altered.
“We have incorporated a visual forensic technology that converges AI technology and alteration detection technology that is able to detect pixel-level alterations into KAICATCH.” said Professor Lee. “We are going to add a function that is able to detect advanced features of various editing tools in the future and develop Deepfake detection engine and normal video alteration detection engine to a commercialization level and incorporate them into KAICATCH as well.”
Meanwhile, KAICATCH was developed in collaboration with Digital Innotech that was established as a laboratory venture by KAIST.
Staff Reporter Kim, Youngjoon | kyj85@etnews.com