Last updated on January 20, 2022

What is Morphing

The word morph comes from the Greek word “metamorphosis,” which means to transform. Morphing refers to smooth transformation of images.
For example – Transforming an image of a rabbit to a dragon

Morphing effects have improved a lot over the years and are more driven towards creating less obvious effects that appear to be more realistic.

Morphing Women’s images and blackmailing

Most people nowadays upload pictures on social media sites and unless privacy settings are not set in these accounts cybercriminals exploit these pictures of women, morphing and misusing them to promote online sexting and pornographic content.

Often cybercriminals use morphing techniques which means modify photographs of a person without their consent and use them. In today’s context morphed photos have become one of the many forms of online crime against women. This is not only faced by celebrities but most women and men present online.

There had been cases of women whose social media profile pictures had been morphed and published on adult websites and afterwards cybercriminals blackmail these women asking for money.

How to identify a morphed photograph

Humans are not very good at recognizing morphed photographs and below mentioned are some quick tips to identify a morphed picture

    1. Digital forensic techniques
      Fotoforensics.com is an excellent fake image detector website. It makes use of a technique called Error Level Analysis (ELA) to find parts of the image that are modified.
      * Remember, if an image is original – Similar edges should have similar brightness, and similar textures should have similar coloring in the ELA result.
    2. When an image is captured via a digital camera, it appends a whole array of information such as date, time, camera model, geolocation, etc to the image file . This is called metadata.
      * Imageedited.comuses this metadata to run a few analyses and tell if an image is edited or not.
    3. Reverse image search
      Google reverse image searchis a great way to find the original source of the image. In here, Just drag and drop or upload the photo in the Google image search bar, and it will bring up all the sources of that image.
    4. Lighting and shadows – Irregularities and discrepancies in lighting and shadows are easy clues
    5. Careful observation and common sense

Carefully looking at the image helps in finding the authenticity of it.

Source: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/31453/morph