We can almost say that we do not stop surprise us by how fast science goes and technologies. Sometimes it even makes you wonder how we have been so quick to advance at such an exponential rate, so why wouldn't those conspiracy theories about technology stolen from aliens be true? Wasn't Copernicus treated like a crazy person for saying that the sun was the center of the Solar System? The reality is that we have devices that have changed our lives and that do not stop evolving to even map the 3D space where we are, as is the case with the Lenovo Phab2.
Now we have another very interesting novelty and that is knowing that your phone can be identified by the photographs you take with it. Yes, it is and it does not mean that we are determining the brand and model of the device by the EXIF data, but that we are talking about the exact phone can be identified by the picture which was taken by simply analyzing the photo. It does not matter that there are millions of people around the world with the same model of smartphone that you have, since there are no two cameras that are capable of taking the same photo. That is why we went to CamFinger, a very different and very striking proposal, rest assured.
The camera imprint with CamFinger
Following the thread, and what you will have been surprised to say that no two cameras take two identical photographsEven if you take a couple of phones of the same model and try to perfectly align them to take two perfect images of the same scene with milliseconds of delay between the two, the results will change dramatically when examined with special software.
This is what scientists refer to as the "camera fingerprint" and that you can find your phone uniquely with the ID of the camera with the app called CamFinger.
This app is the result of a study in authentication methods between the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Polytechnic University of Milan. CamFinger can teach you some really cool things about how phone cameras and digital cameras work in general, while contributing some anonymous data to the study by taking some out-of-focus photos of nothing in particular.
How CamFinger works
As I have said, they never cease to amaze us with these curious applications and those studies, so once installing the app, you will have to take four batches of four images each, it can already be of the carpet, the ground or even the sky . These shots taken will be uploaded to the cloud and analyzed to return a noisy image named PRNU (Photo Respones Non Uniformity).
Basically the camera sensor of your device far from being as perfect as you might think. Every time you take a photo, various sensor imperfections leave their mark on the image and can potentially be used to identify the device. Some areas of the sensor will interpret incoming light in different ways, resulting in some pixels appearing brighter, while others are darker. The end result, therefore, will always be a little brighter or too dark in those same pixels.
When using CamFinger, a dozen images can be layered on top of each other and filtered to look like an image of a random snowflake, which is the unique pattern of bright and dark dots that are intrinsic to your device's camera sensor. Like fingerprints, the sensor ID remains the same throughout its lifetime and can be used to identify it.
That's right one step away from knowing the unique ID of the camera from your phone and learn more about the entire photography process with CamFinger, a free app that you have at your disposal below from the widget.
