Exploring heuristic and optimum branching algorithms for image phylogeny

•We explore one heuristic algorithm for finding the evolution history of images.•We explore one optimum branching algorithm for the same task.•Applications are tracking image broadcasting or the chain of image distribution.•350,000 test cases show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.•Our solution finds the ancestry connections in a set and the original document.

Currently, multimedia objects can be easily created, stored, (re)-transmitted, and edited for good or bad. In this sense, there has been an increasing interest in finding the structure of temporal evolution within a set of documents and how documents are related to one another overtime. This process, also known in the literature as Multimedia Phylogeny, aims at finding the phylogeny tree(s) that best explains the creation process of a set of near-duplicate documents (e.g., images/videos) and their ancestry relationships. Solutions to this problem have direct applications in forensics, security, copyright enforcement, news tracking services and other areas. In this paper, we explore one heuristic and one optimum branching algorithm for reconstructing the evolutionary tree associated with a set of image documents. This can be useful for aiding experts to track the source of child pornography image broadcasting or the chain of image distribution in time, for instance. We compare the algorithms with the state-of-the-art solution considering 350,000 test cases and discuss advantages and disadvantages of each one in a real scenario.