My personal feeling is that combating fake contents with technology alone is not a winning strategy. Today, we see a great interest in deepfakes since this technology is widespread and can create credible forgeries that can potentially be used for non-consensual pornography, political misinformation, etc. That is why digital audio forensics entered the courts well before digital image and video forensics: digital audio emerged before digital cameras! One significant trend is rather straightforward to see: the more something is used, the more it will be used also for committing crimes and for legal applications. What are the most significant trends you’ve noticed in the past decade of working in this industry, and what challenges do you see these trends presenting? The wide spread of multimedia content makes it evident that we must invest in their protection and forensic analysis: pictures are everywhere! So, I started working on watermarking, then rapidly moved to newer “blind” image forensic approaches. Working with digital images is extremely rewarding because you can experiment with real pixels, you do not have to “simulate” anything. They introduced me to the magical world of image processing and analysis. There are many professors, but some of them are real teachers: their enthusiasm and positive look at reality is contagious. Multimedia forensics came later, when I met Professor Piva at the University of Florence and then Professor Barni at the University of Siena. (Funnily enough, I skipped one day of school to go to university!) There I understood that I loved what those people were doing, I wanted to take part in that.

I had some older friends who were in university at the faculty of engineering, and they invited me to some workshops where people from the industry showed the students what engineers had achieved through science and technology: the latest developments in mobile communications (the novelty was 3G at the time!), space exploration, and so on.

My interest in engineering began when I was in high school. How did you come to your interest in multimedia forensics and engineering? Marco, let’s start with a little about you.

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