
Stolen Camera Finder - obtino
http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/
======
humblepie
I had my Canon DSLR body cleaned at the service centre here in Brampton, ON.
When I got it back I noticed it felt different--the shutter sound is more
thumpy, and etc. I checked the serial number to check if it was really mine
and it was. It's all fine but then months later just by some coincidence I saw
a photo on Flickr with my e-mail address in the metatags. Some of my photo
buddies warned me that Canon is notorious for swapping parts when your cameras
are in for service.

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yellowbkpk
Would it be possible to process the images somehow and find the noise profile
for every image and match it with existing images?

When I found a directory full of images and couldn't remember which camera
took them, I noticed that there were a few fuzzy pixels of green and red if I
zoomed all the way in that were present in all photos taken by that camera. I
took a photo of a white wall in a dark room (to force high ISO) with a couple
of my cameras and found the one. Of course I found out about the EXIF serial
number and other unique data later on, but it could still be useful on sites
that store the original image but strip EXIF.

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JoelSutherland
If this were possible wouldn't cameras already be taking advantage of this to
eliminate the noise in the first place?

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s00pcan
They do. My Canon PowerShot G3 did this and I've had that since 2004. The way
it works is this: the camera takes two photos of equal shutter speed length,
except the second is done with the aperture completely closed. This gives you
a noise profile on what should be a completely black screen equal to the noise
generated during the real photo. The camera then automatically removes the
noise from the first photo using the second. Of course, this means you have to
wait for the camera to take and process the second shot, which could be up to
several seconds long. This is naturally only done on low-light shots though,
meaning things like dead pixels are still present on most photos.

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cousin_it
So if I find a photo I like, I can find all other photos taken by the same
camera? Is there potential for stalking here?

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peterb
I guess Amateur porn just got a lot less anonymous.

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josefresco
Holy christ you're right. There are whole communities online of amateurs that
publish their own 'adult' photos. What's the likelihood that they also post
their family/other photos elsewhere online?

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blhack
I assume most places like that would strip exif data already.

Imgur does, for instance.

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oozcitak
In my opinion, personal blogs are a bigger problem. Even wordpress.com does
not sanitize pictures. I believe many bloggers are unaware of that.

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rednum
I think it could help to add a feature "I've found camera/sd card/other device
with photos". Just an anecdotal evidence, but my friend's friend found an iPod
with some photos few years ago and couldn't locate the owner. Surely it
doesn't happen very often, but if this site gained enough popularity, it could
be really helpful.

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GFischer
It's a good idea, I found a Sony Memory Stick (back when they were quite
expensive), I would have liked to track the owner as well.

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charlief
Good idea, but works most effectively when:

(1) Various encode/decode steps along to publishing the photo online don't
corrupt EXIF data

(2) Thief isn't sophisticated to wipe/disable EXIF data. Many cameras shoot in
a proprietary, higher-bit format and give you a fairly obvious wizard option
on a desktop tool to include/exclude the EXIF data.

(3) Thief will use the camera, not sell it immediately into a second-hand
market.

(4) Even if your camera is supported, it has to be configured to record EXIF
data by both you and the thief. Some proprietary formats are fairly raw and
don't always include EXIF-derivable data by default.

This will get some adoption because what other option do users have, but it
will be interesting to see how many uploads convert to a lost camera being
recovered/thief being apprehended. If users had the ability to leave a
testimonial when there is some kind of closure, you could derive a metric of
success.

~~~
kyleslattery
Yup--my camera (Canon 60D) was listed, but when I used a photo that had been
exported with Lightroom, it couldn't read the serial number. Only when I gave
an original JPEG did it have any success, and it didn't end up finding any
photos, since anything I've uploaded has been exported through Lightroom.

~~~
dunham
I tried it with an old Canon Rebel XTi photo that had gone through Lightroom
and flickr. "exiftool" shows a serial number in the image, but the web site
does not.

I downloaded the "original" size from flickr - resized flickr images seem to
drop most of the exif info, and the "exif info" displayed on the web site no
longer shows serial numbers.

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jasonkester
Tried it with a photo taken from a camera I had stolen in Peru:

 _The 'SAMSUNG TECHWIN CO., LTD. Samsung SL201' does not write serial
information in the exif. See the supported cameras page for a list of models
that do._

~~~
nprincigalli

      > a camera I had stolen in Peru
    

Not the slightest bit of guilt? or maybe you meant

    
    
      a camera stolen from me in Peru
    

:)

~~~
jrockway
The construction you are making fun of means "someone stole my camera" just as
much as it means "i stole a camera". From context, though, it's clear that the
first is what the author means. No rephrasing is necessary to convey the
message; the sentence is 100% correct as-is.

~~~
joebadmo
It's obviously pretty unclear in the worst possible way, though, and pretty
awkward, too. I disagree that the context makes it completely clear. There are
any number of ways to write that sentence without the ambiguity.

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meinhimmel
Another neat idea: Allow the user to select their city, the make and model of
the camera, and the date it was stolen. Then you can scrape Craigslist from
the surrounding area and show possible matches.

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corin_
What's the database of photos it can search against like? I just tried looking
up a photo, the site found the serial number in it but couldn't find any
matching photos online. I know the exist, even the exact same photo I was
testing with is available on various websites.

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pavel_lishin
That same photo may have had its EXIF data stripped out.

~~~
corin_
Would have been a direct upload via FTP, no modifications.

Either way, presumably they haven't indexed every photo on the net?

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subway
Obviously I'm an edge case, but I'm not using a graphical file manager, so I
can't use the drag and drop method of providing a file.

Have you considered allowing users to specify a file by URL, or the browser's
browse mechanism for file input?

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stevejalim
It's a shame some smartphone cameras (eg, my old Nexus One) don't tag with
full EXIF data, else you'd then have a much larger potential userbase.

~~~
biot
Interesting reaction. When Intel was going to include a unique serial number
in every CPU, I recall a lot of people getting into an uproar over the privacy
implications.

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defroost
For one camera I got: "fail The 'NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D200' does not write
serial information in the exif. See the supported cameras page for a list of
models that do."

For my other camera, a Pentax K20D which is on the supported list I got:

"Problem extracting serial number. If possible, use an original image from the
camera that has not been edited in any software."

The only thing I had done was uploaded the image from the camera via iPhoto.
But all the EXIF data was in tact, including the Pentax K20D, the serial #,
even the lens I used. So I don't think iPhoto stripped any data.

I'm wondering why if Flickr for example can extract all of the EXIF data, even
for images not directly from the flash card, why did this happen?

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seles
I doubt this will every successfully result in a stolen camera being
recovered. But, it is a cool new idea that certainly has other obvious
applications such as finding other photos by the same camera.

Would it be better rebranded to a different purpose?

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tel
So this uses exif data, which as people here have noted can be stripped, but
can't you still ID digital cameras from things like sensor noise? I haven't
looked at the statistical properties of it, it probably changes over time,
only works on at high ISOs, and search would be way more intensive, but I know
that my camera has a very predictable noise pattern.

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lostbit
The photo itself is not uploaded to the site for checking. Only a few bytes
with the serial and camera model/manufacturer are sent in a HTTP GET to
stolencamerafinder.com. This makes it very light in traffic.

The site can expand the camera->owner database by searching photos with valid
EXIFs on famous sites and correlating it to the user.

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hallowtech
No love for RW2 I guess =( Also, add an upload button, I don't want to
drag&drop if my browser is full screen!

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TWSS
Not as drag-and-drop easy, but GadgetTrak is working on something similar:
<http://gadgettrak.com/labs/camera/>

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PanMan
Great idea. But instead of a serial input, it should ask for a photo or Flickr
account or so. I don't know my cam's serial, and I can't look it up easily if
it's stolen.

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hortonew
They do ask for a photo.

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PanMan
They didn't this morning, from my iPad. It can be they do device/browser
detection, but they don't tell you that. Now, from my browser they indeed ask
for a picture.

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Sniffnoy
This really needs the addition of an "enter a URL" or "upload a photo"
interface - drag and drop often does not work! Or does not easily work,
anyway.

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antidaily
I haven't gotten this to work once. Cool idea though.

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wicknicks
A lot of cameras don't include the Serial Number in the EXIF header. What
happens then?

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MasterScrat
On Chrome, drag-n-dropping from other windows doesn't seem to work (on Windows
7).

~~~
Splines
This doesn't help very much, but it worked for me (drag from file explorer in
W2K8R2 into Chrome 11.0.696.60). Do you have UAC turned on?

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wazoox
Apparently this doesn't work in Firefox. Too bad.

~~~
wazoox
Why the downvotes? it didn't work for me with FF4/Linux nor FF4/Mac. It worked
on Chrome, though.

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bxr
Seems like a neat idea for a search engine, but I tried with photos from 6
different cameras and none of them stored the serial number in exif. I wonder
how many models this is actually useful for.

~~~
TimMontague
There seems to be a fair number of models that are supported:

<http://www.stolencamerafinder.com/listmodels>

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bxr
Thanks, I completely missed that list. I'm going to try and find a friend with
one of those so I can play around with this a bit.

~~~
TimMontague
That list should probably be linked to from the front page, instead of hidden
4 pages deep.

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kwestin
The project is a great proof of concept, the chances this will get someone's
stolen camera back is pretty slim. We have a similar project, but it searches
for the data using existing search engine data. Only about 25% of cameras will
embed the serial number, then when uploaded only a few sites will retain the
EXIF data, or provide it through meta data. A few that keep the EXIF data or
provide it in meta data include:

Flickr.com DeviantArt.com SmugMug.com Picasa.com

Some of these sites strip out some tags. Some manufacturers have custom EXIF
tags like Nikon which may store the serial in a "Serial Number" tag or a tag
called "0x00D".

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maqr
Terrible idea. EXIF data is not reliable. You can make it say anything you
want.

~~~
jcsalterego
Do most thieves tinker with or strip the EXIF data then? Otherwise it seems
like a good utility for the common case.

