The credibility of images today is in crisis. Where images claim to document an event unadulterated, reliability plays a major role, as in journalistic or documentary practice, for example. But doubts about the reliability of images are growing. For years there have been cases of blatant photo manipulation at major photo competitions.

As already outlined in Part IV of this series, the image editing program ImageJ, developed by Wayne Rasband under the auspices of the United States National Institute of Health, offers a wide range of image editing possibilities, as well as a wealth of tools and extensions that can be used for measuring and analyzing images.

ImageJ is a public domain image-processing program developed under the auspices of the United States National Institutes of Health and especially popular among biologists. It was first published in 1997 and is designed to support a large range of image processing and analysis tasks and the detection of image manipulations in many different types of images.

The US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) in the United States has been occupied with research integrity related issues for well over two decades. The office was established in 1992 by consolidating the „Office of Scientific Integrity“ and the „Office of Scientific Integrity Review.“ Today the Office of Research Integrity oversees many of the „Public Health Service (PHS) research integrity activities on behalf of the Secretary of Health and Human Services.“

Another tool available on the website “Forensically” helps with the detection of clones. Like the Error Analysis Tool, which was discussed earlier on this blog, the Clone Detection Tool includes a set of levels that enable the user to identify manipulated areas in images.

Over the last decade inappropriate image manipulations have become a serious concern in a variety of sectors of society, such as in the news, in politics or the entertainment sector. Digital image editing programs are nowadays very powerful and constantly change how we produce and understand images. In academia images play a very important role and due to a number of fraud incidents image manipulation gained more and more attention.