C.S.I. Miami -Digital Camera DNA
I remain a big fan of the all of the C.S.I. franchises, but sometimes I think they really should be labeled Sci-Fi.
In the episode titled "Collateral Damage", the crew led by Horatio Cane is trying to track down the photographer who took a particular photo of some suspects. They were at a dead-end until one of the lab guys suggested they could identify the make and model of the camera that took the photograph by analyzing the photos pixel pattern. He said that every make and model of camera created a very distinct pixel pattern; he compared it to DNA in humans.
They quickly identified the camera. BULL!!! "Luckily" they had already encountered a photographer who happened to shoot with the very make and model of camera. What a Break!
Now I don’t know whether or not these "pixel patterns" exist; I suspect they do. Every digital camera has a semi-conductor chip that has millions of tiny photo sensors placed on it. You can almost call them small solar panels. When light hits them they generate an electrical burst which is read by the computer in the camera as a digital 1. If no light (or the wrong kind of light) hits the photo cell, the computer registers a digital 0. From these 1′s and 0′s, a computer image is created.
It stands to reason that the way these millions of sensors are alligned is probably different for different types of chips and that this is reflected in the pictures (under high magnification). That being said, I doubt that every different make of camera uses a different chip. Several different models by the same manufacturer probably use the same chip.
That’s just speculation. The part that I’m certain deserves a Bull call is the fact that they just happened to have a database which they could use to match up the pixel pattern with the right camera. Not only were they able to instantly match the pattern, the camera that came up on their screen had the exact same lens on it that the guilty photographer was using.
I feel 100% certain in saying there is NO database in existence that contains the pixel pattern for every digital camera on the market.
