Humans are easily fooled by digital images.

Digital images are everywhere, from social media to news and scientific papers. This paper describes an extensive user study to evaluate the ability of an average individual to spot edited images. By design, our study avoids lucky guesses. After observing an image, subjects were asked if it is authentic or not. Whenever a subject indicated that an image has been altered, (s)he had to provide evidence to support the answer by pointing at the suspected region in the image. We collected 17,208 individual answers from 393 volunteers, using 177 images selected from public forensic databases. Our results indicate that the average individual is not good at distinguishing original from edited images, answering correctly on 58% of all images, and only identifying the modified ones 46.5% of the time. This performance is superior to random guessing, but poor compared to results achieved by computational techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]