The new ISO/IEC standard, known as the JPEG Trust, will provide a framework for establishing trust in media this summer. This can also be applied to video and audio. Rather than deciding what is trustworthy, the standard will describe tools and methodologies that individuals and organisations can use to create their own Trust Profiles. It does this by linking images with their metadata and other provenance data to highlight any attempt to tamper with them. The presence or absence of this information provides the contextual information for the establishment of trust in the image.
JPEG Trust also addresses privacy and security concerns. Protecting information about an image may be essential to avoid revealing the identity of a whistle blower, or a photographer capturing an image in a conflict zone. In both these examples, an organization or agency could sign the media asset instead of the photographer.
The new standard was a focus of the recent AI for Good summit in Geneva. The discussion led to the announcement of a wider World Standards Cooperation project to address the challenges of deepfakes and generative AI.
A diverse range of organizations are joining the IEC, ISO and the ITU in the initiative. They include the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The ITU-led initiative establishes a multi-stakeholder collaboration on global standards for AI watermarking, multimedia authenticity and deepfake detection technologies. It aims to provide a global forum for dialogue on priority areas, as well as mapping the landscape of relevant technical standards, facilitating the sharing of knowledge and identifying gaps where new standards or conformity assessment are required.