Adobe has collaborated with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop a new tool to detect when photos have been digitally altered using Photoshop’s Face-Aware Liquify tool and adjust them back to the original image.
The prototype tool, codenamed ‘Project About Face,’ will pore over an image pixel-by-pixel and create a heat map showing where it believes the image is most likely altered. From there, the edits can effectively be undone to show what the original image looked like.
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According to Adobe, the tool is nearly twice as accurate as humans at detecting when a photograph has been altered. In its testing, Project About Face was able to detect altered images with 99-percent accuracy compared to the 53-percent accuracy of the human test group.
Since this only works with images edited inside Photoshop with its Face-Aware Liquify tool, the practical application isn’t widespread, but it’s a neat teaser nonetheless for future fake-detection methods.
Project About Face is just one of the many ‘Sneaks’ Adobe teased this year at Adobe MAX. Like many of the Sneaks, it’s unlikely we’ll see this tool available anytime soon, but it goes to show the growing possibilities of Adobe’s Sensei AI.