We live in the world of information and digital technologies. Both of them go hand in hand and probably no one can imagine living without them. But what happens if one of them skews the other one? What if information being presented is not as true as it looks like? 

Mounting someone face to another photo is pretty funny and shows us how impressive the tools are nowadays. Artificial intelligence can construct whole images from nothing and so it can construct faces on those images, too. How would you prove if it creates your face by chance that this is not a real footage?

Generally, how can you prove or verify digital photographs’ credibility?

Now you can capture photos with the ability to be verified! 

Let's create photos that can be trusted!

Motivation

We plan to provide a wide spectrum of users and businesses with tools to create credible photos and the services to effectively use these photos.
We focus on authors, owners, publishers, use rights, privacy, and security of digital photography.
And, of course, on the authenticity and quality of the image itself.

Please, read our story to get the key views of the service and values it can provide. 
You will also get the understanding of the perks and that is important for us, to be for you as clear as possible.

What is the Trusted image?

The Trusted image now is an iOS application for iPhones for secure photo capturing, verification and signature management from the users’ point of view. And at the same time, there is an online services part responsible for communicating with users through the application and for solving their requests like signing and verification of images.

One of the key building blocks of the Trusted image is the signature! As a part of an image, yet invisible to human eyes, it is still resistible against:

• brightness manipulations
• color manipulations
• contrast manipulations
• converting to grayscale
• convolution filters
• scale - the scale factor is variable and depends on image visual attributes
• flipping and rotations - rotations in 90° steps CW or CCW

What the Trusted image service produces?

Our service produces digital photographs signed by our so-called "Image Adaptive Neural Networks". These networks work with the image data the way that they do not visually corrupt the image. We are targeting visual authenticity so the Trusted image application always captures at the highest resolution and uses lossless compression on captured photos. If the user decides to sign the photo, it is uploaded to our service. After the photo is signed, we inform the user that Trusted images are available to download. 

The service produce the "Trusted image Original" - full resolution, losslessly compressed TIFF file. As the name implies, this is the most valuable photo for the user! The key to the service features. From this photo, you can create custom or predefined signed derivates in the future.

At the same time, it offers the first "Trusted image Derivate" - full resolution, lossy compressed JPEG file as the first derivate of the original. This photo cannot be further derivated and signed using the service!

Note: Authors must download signed photos within a month from their signature. Once downloaded successfully to the Trusted image application, they are deleted on the service side.

! The service doesn't depend on stored visual data, so we do not store such data !
As there is no visual representation of your signed photo stored on our side, it is important to keep at least one Trusted image Original copy of your photo safe and ideally backed up for your future use! 

The verification and analysis part of the service produces Verification Reports. These reports show you what we know about the image being verified with respect to the users and image privacy settings. In deeper analysis (change detection for example), it provides reports showing what and where some image changes happened.

Who can or should use Trusted image and how?

This funny question has caused us multiple mental exhaustion, mass headaches, but also amazement at how it could basically be simple. 

Our principle is to give some benefits to parties involved in the digital photo lifetime. The main benefit is the photo itself, because it gets new properties with the signature, yet without losing quality. And photos are used almost everywhere. See below for some potential users.

Photographers

As a photographer of any level, you are probably facing many of "impractical" weaknesses of the digital photography. A lot of questions starting with "How..." For example: How do you prove the ownership of the photo? How do you prove the authenticity of the photo? How do you prove that you haven’t modified the photo? 

With Trusted image, you can set yourself free of these questions and just use them! You, as an author, will literally become entangled in the original photo you capture and sign. But don't worry, no one can see it, nor can we. Your image will be visually the same as without the signature! 

Media

Publish or not to publish? It is a basic question for you, isn't it? How do you check the photos at the inputs? You believe in your own photographers of course... But is it enough? Aren't there some more photos of a particular situation you are telling the world about? Do you have a budget big enough to handle all of your photographers happy? There can be a fleet of your photo sources around the world without you moving from your office desk!

With Trusted image, you can verify any signed photo, even from unknown sources to you, within a minute after the delivery! And you will see if it is authentic and trustworthy. We are also planning to upgrade in a way that you will be able to ask if you can use the photo or request permissions from the author. And there can be much more.

Photo stocks

Data duplication, authenticity, and uniqueness? Do you or your IT staff talk about them? And how about the authors? Aren't there copies of the same photo with different properties, modifications, or even authors? 

With Trusted image, you can quickly define the amount of trust you require, verify the images at the inputs and very effectively stay "clean" from duplicates as well as build and keep the trust between you and your customers or sources.

Insurance companies

Do you have a fleet of employees to document every case? How do they capture? Do they have access to these photos? Are the photos authentic? Do they document the situation on-site?

Wouldn't it be nice to have these photos from anyone around and be sure they are authentic, unmodified, thus usable to your business?

With Trusted image, you can use any verified photo you receive from anyone. You are able to check the date and time and the location of the photo and, of course, the authenticity.

The Public

We all read the web, news, social media... And there are photos just like everywhere. Are they authentic? Can or should you believe them as the reader and consumer? They can play big roles in everyone’s decision processes. But is it really an image of reality you are looking at? Isn't someone just trying to fool you?

With the Trusted image, the publishers, authors, companies, e-shops and others can be brave enough to support authentic photo content and express it by implementing upcoming features or integrations to prove their photo content is "fake-free".

What do you need to create or verify Trusted images?

It is simple. 

• Trusted image for iPhone application (will be available free on Apple AppStore) - This allows you to capture photos, request their signature, download signed Ti Originals and Ti Derivates, verify images, manage the account, apply redeem codes (as of now) and more (as planned) like requesting "social networks" specific derivates, entitled derivates...
• Trusted image account - Successfully registered and verified/activated account is the key to use the application and shoot photos with it. Shots are stored locally on your device until you decide to sign or not to sign the image. Once you decide not to sign the image, you will get the unsigned image, but you will lose the chance to sign this image.
• Trusted image Crown(s) (TiCs) - These have the power to sign or verify images. Operations like signing or verifying are resources intensive tasks and they are accounted to users via TiCs. You must have some TiCs at your account to do such accounted operations.  

The Perks explained

Now you should have fresh information about what you need to use the Trusted image. Let's explain the Perks offered.

The Donate Perk is for you to support our ideas yet not planning to use the service.

As the Backer of Entry, Bronze, Silver or Gold Perk (and only in this case), you will get:

• An active account for the time defined in particular Perk
• Early access to Premium services and tools for the same time
• Discounts on TiCs offers

The time periods will start counting at the launch time of the service for backers.

We will start offering our services only for Backers!

The Enterprise Perk is a bit different from the others. We offer one year of dedicated resources with the amount of 10.000 TiCs with up to 100 user accounts linked, plus our team capacities to discuss integration patterns possible to support backers systems and processes. 

Don't miss this chance to get an early access!

What will funds be used for?

The very basic idea of our service, to build the trust between the parties involved around images, might seem simple, but designing, developing and running all pieces of the system around this idea is unfortunately not of this kind.

We can split this topic into the following parts:

• Operational expenses
  As we do computationally demanding tasks, we need to run on adequate hardware to be able to reach useful quality of services and as fast as possible. We do not want you to wait days for your signed photos! Our calculations and test show us that we can sign hundreds of thousands photos per month and verify more than a million of them. That is just an initial setup and sizing we need to start with. Our systems are ready to grow. But the computers and software cannot take care about themselves, so their running also involves some human resources.
• Enhancements of the existing Trusted image parts (capacities)
  As we are finishing works on the Service and the Trusted image iOS application to be ready shortly after the campaign, we all know that nothing is perfect. There are places where we need or want to push a bit more on the development and enhance or fine tune existing functionalities. This applies to the systems of the Service as well as to the Trusted image iOS application. There are still works to be done to get things ready for a wide production use.
• The Future
  For us to leverage more of the potential of the service, like advancing to other devices for capturing images, we are planning new features for users as well as for businesses. The funds can be used here too to start selected features development and this, again, needs capacities in a form of not only human resources of different kinds.
  
  And what the "upcoming features list" contains? A few unsorted examples:
  • Browser plugin for public verifications
  • JavaScript library for web integrated public fast verifications
  • Desktop management & signing application (Mac, Win, ...?)
  • Entitlements - You will be able to designate images for a concrete use on concrete webs, for example.
  • Rights support - Authors are undetachable from our photos, that is clear, but the ownership of different forms of use rights or full ownership of the photo can (and as to be able to) change in time. We are planning to provide these features so the Trusted image will never be "lost" in time. It can and it will have its lifetime documented.
  • Still cameras & other photo capture devices - We are sure there are ways to spread the Trusted image to other devices. Raised funds will help us explore the possibilities towards these devices.

We do not see the Trusted image as a small service in the future, so the goal is set as it is. We know it might look a bit high, but taking into account thousands of users and maybe millions of photos, and we also know we cannot do it effectively with four team members, you will probably find out that our goal is not that big in this context.

Reaching our goal can help us a lot to provide easy adoptable services quickly.

The team behind

We started this project two years ago with a minimal amount of people to be called a team - that is two. Designing the systems, solving daily challenges from technical to ethical fields, designing and tuning our neural networks up and down, back and forth. During the time we have enriched our team with two new members, so we have doubled the team. We have done a lot of work, but there is still work to be done. 

Robert Jarušek	Petr Soukup
Pavel Veškrna	Nikoleta Niklová

Do you like our ideas?

Whether you plan to become our backer or you just like our ideas, please, share our project with your friends and business partners to let them know that we are here!

THANK YOU

For more information about how it all happened or if you are interested in more technical background, please visit www.trusted-image.com/story