Efficient sensor fingerprint matching through fingerprint binarization

It is now established that photo-response nonuniformity noise pattern can be reliably used as a fingerprint to identify an image sensor. The large size and random nature of sensor fingerprints, however, make them inconvenient to store. Further, associated fingerprint matching method can be computationally expensive, especially for applications that involve large-scale databases. To address these limitations, we propose to represent sensor fingerprints in binary-quantized form. It is shown through both analytical study and simulations that the reduction in matching accuracy due to quantization is insignificant as compared to conventional approaches. Experiments on actual sensor fingerprint data are conducted to confirm that only a slight increase occurred in the probability of error and to demonstrate the computational efficacy of the approach.