A photographer who has won a raft of prizes in a national contest has been stripped of his awards after the organizer confirmed his prize-winning works were plagiarism from an image database.

China Photographers Association, the organizer of the photo contest, yesterday accused Hou Xie, from central China's Hunan Province of plagiarism involving his three prize-winning photos and warned him of a possible lifetime ban from the contest in future.

Hou admitted the gold award-winning picture "Tomorrow's reality" was actually created by digitally stitching two different pictures from separate image databases.

Hou said he didn't realize processed picture cannot be used in the contest and apologized to the photo's original authors, although he didn't know who the authors are because the photos carried no bylines.

As the biggest winner this year, Hou won two gold prizes, a bronze, and two fourth prizes out of more than 180,000 competitors, reported Yangtze Evening News today.