Disinformation and misinformation is a growing problem for our society since the rise of social media. Images are spread and viewed at a rapid pace, without guarantees on their authenticity. To address this, independent news media conduct fact checks in which they check and refute viral messages. Despite news organisations’ vast baggage of experience and knowledge, detecting manipulations made with sophisticated techniques is extremely difficult.

The COM-PRESS research project will develop detection methods that journalists can use to detect and debunk image manipulations. It investigates new, promising techniques that look deeper than what can be seen with the naked eye (e.g., at the compression history). The COM-PRESS consortium will further explore these techniques in fundamental research, while bridging the gap to socially relevant use cases.

The research groups IDLab-MEDIA and imec-mict-UGent (both from UGent-imec) join forces with Apache (De Werktitel cv) as media partner. Moreover, the consortium is working with CheckFirst to build a dashboard. The project runs from October 2022 to June 2024, with subsidies from the Flemish government’s Department of Culture, Youth & Media.

Contact: Prof. dr. Tom Evens