C2PA Authenticity

[Kevin M. Cox]

Cool to see Camera Bits working on this initiative: https://c2pa.org

Sony Electronics and The Associated Press Complete Testing of Advanced In-Camera Authenticity Technology to Address Growing Concerns Around Fake Imagery
https://www.sony.com/content/sony/en/en_us/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-electronics/2023/sony-electronics-and-the-associated-press-complete-testing-of-advanced-incamera-authenticity-technology-to-address-growing-concerns-around-fake-imagery.html

Sony and AP's most recent field test was completed during October of 2023. In this month-long test, both capture authentication and workflow process were evaluated. To accomplish this, Sony partnered with Camera Bits – the company behind the industry standard workflow tool, Photo Mechanic. Alongside Sony and AP, Camera Bits created technology in Photo Mechanic that preserves the camera's digital signature all the way through the metadata editing process.

[Stenis]

I read:
"Sony and AP's most recent field test was completed during October of 2023. In this month-long test, both capture authentication and workflow process were evaluated. To accomplish this, Sony partnered with Camera Bits – the company behind the industry standard workflow tool, Photo Mechanic. Alongside Sony and AP, Camera Bits created technology in Photo Mechanic that preserves the camera's digital signature all the way through the metadata editing process.

"We appreciate the significant challenge that manipulated imagery poses for our partners, and we are highly motivated to play a role in helping solve it," says Dennis Walker, President and Founder of Camera Bits. "Photo Mechanic has been used by the photojournalism industry for 25 years and continues to evolve as the industry introduces new technology. We are committed to ensuring Photo Mechanic remains a trusted and authentic workflow solution."

Sony's new in-camera signature and C2PA authentication is planned for release in a firmware update in the newly announced Alpha 9 III, Alpha 1, and Alpha 7S III in the Spring of 2024 i."

As a user of both Sony A7 IV which they write have been used in the early test of this system and Photolab I´m a little interested to know how this is actually planned to work. Is this signature going to be an integrated part of XMP (an own namespace or so) or old EXIF? Is Sony teaming up with AP and not the least Camera Bits of the reason PhotoMechanic already is a corner stone in many news-, event- and sports photographers toolbox.

It would have been nice if either Dennis Walker or Kirk Baker could enlighten us a little deeper and describe how this is supposed to work at least in PhootoMechanic.
Does anyone know where there is a schema to see over how this "workflow" is going to work.
For example, how to preserve authenticy mark up from a RAW from the camera to a JPEG exported from a RAW-converter for example.
Do all the client applications we like to use in this workflow in the future need to be CSPA-compliant??

[Kevin M. Cox]

There is a ton of information on the C2PA website: https://c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/1.3/index.html

Im curious too, but its probably too early to reveal specifics on the implementation.

[Stenis]

This is very complex
From what I can see reading these specifications there is a new updated version of the IPTC Photo Metadadata Standard 2023.1 from 4th of October (just a few weeks old).

https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata#metadata-properties-2

I understand now why Sony and Associated Press wanted to team up with Camera Bits and PhotoMechanics
Since AP probably is using PhotoMechanic a lot Camera Bits has to be involved deeply.
There will be a lot of metadata schema work för Camera Bits to do.

IPTC Photo Metadata Standard 2023.1
IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group
office@iptc.org
Version 2023.1 Rev 0,
2023-10-04

I wonder how this will get implemented properly when there are so many mismatches in metadata exchange already today.
And in that "Manifest" there is data for GPS-position but in the camera Sony and AP seem to have used there isn´t even a GPS-function as is.

All the applications used by photographs will need to be i sync when it comes to the metadata workflows and have support for the C2PA-metadata and "manifests".
All the image formats used need to be C2PA aware too.

I saw PDF, JPEG, TIFF and DNG that I have used are part of the list and many more.

This shall be interesting to follow.
Of what I have seen this will not be anything for a small business photographer.
This seems more of a system developed for the big companies that see a need to protect immaterial values from the parasitic teeth of AI.

It will be very interesting to see if this will be possible to implement in a way that it can be used even by smaller companies and individual photographers with smaller resources.
It will also be very interesting to see how the AI world will handle C2PA and respond.

[carlseibert]

Hi,  Cross-posting from my original thread.

I just posted an opus-length blog post on C2PA (with a video version) at

https://www.carlseibert.com/first-camera-with-cai-content-credentials-introduced/

Cheers.

-Carl

[Stenis]

Thanks for this article and your good work Carl, it clarifies quite a lot that have been pretty hard to grasp from the C2PA-specification itself.

I have a Sony A7 IV and have read that this model was used in Sonys and Camera Bits joint effort to develop C2PA-support in a workflow for Associated Press (AP).
Do you know if there is a beta firmware to test??
I can´t see anything like that yet at MySony that can be used for downloading firmware.
I´m interested to see how the metadata looks in EXIF, ITPC and XMP.

[Kevin M. Cox]

The Sony firmware update to enable the feature is announced for a March 2024 release.

[Stenis]

Even för Sony A7 IV?

I saw info about A1 and maybee it was A7sIII.