Last month, Leica unveiled a new camera with hardware and software designed to facilitate image verification at the moment the shutter button is pressed. Now, Sony has announced the completion of a month-long field test to enable similar technology in its cameras.
Sony's Neal Manowitz said: "While the rapid development of generative AI (artificial intelligence) has brought new possibilities for creative expression, it has also led to growing concerns about the impact of tampered or manipulated images on news reporting. The spread of false information and images has real social impacts, causing harm not only to our photojournalists and news agency partners, but to society as a whole. We are very concerned about this challenge and are committed to using our resources to help solve it."
"Through Sony's work on the C2PA (Content Provenance and Authenticity Alliance) Steering Committee, we have helped develop the current industry standard for tracking image editing and processing. In addition, we have achieved valuable results with our in-camera authenticity technology, and we will continue to promote the development of this technology and make it more widely available."
A recently completed field trial of the technology, conducted in partnership with the Associated Press, adds a digital signature to each image via a hardware chipset as it is taken.
In addition to generating "birth certificates" in-camera, Sony has also set its sights on ensuring transparency throughout the post-shoot editing and publishing process. The project worked with CameraBits, developers of the PhotoMechanic post-processing workflow suite, to ensure that digital signatures and subsequent changes to each image are preserved in the metadata.
Sony has already announced that it will add C2PA certification technology to its latest professional camera Alpha 9III, and now confirms that Alpha1 and Alpha7SIII will also join the fight against fake images through firmware updates in the northern hemisphere spring of 2024.