Activity update from the IFS TC

by Mauro Barni (IFS TC Past Chair)

The Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society promotes scientific and educational activities within the broad scope of multimedia security. Specific fields of interest include (but are not limited to) selective encryption for multimedia content, digital rights management, steganography and steganalysis, physically unclonable functions, biometrics security, digital watermarking, signal processing in the encrypted domain, robust hash functions, video surveillance and anomalous event detection.

It has been a long time since the latest news from the IFS-TC was posted on the eNews . That is not because nothing interesting happened, on the contrary, too many things happened and are still happening, keeping all of us so busy that we could not account for them in the eNews.

Let us try to recapitulate the updates starting from the beginning of 2012. The first important news is leadership and membership succession: starting from January 2012, Min Wu from University of Maryland succeeds Mauro Barni and will serve as chair of the IFS-TC for two years. She will, together with other TC members, work to promote the advancement of science and technology in information security and forensics within the Signal Processing Society and beyond.

Starting from January 2012, nine new members joined the IFS-TC: Patrick Bas, Dinei Florencio, Anthony TS Ho, Jiwu Huang, Ching-Yung Lin, Anderson Rocha, Husrev T. Sencar, Yun Q. Shi and Yan (Lindsay) Sun. TC thanks the service from nine retiring members whose term ended in 2011: Jan P. Allebach, Vijayakumar Bhagavatula, Robert K. Cunningham, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Deepa Kundur, Richard Lippmann, Qibin Sun, James L. Wayman, and Nasir Memon.

Also starting from 2012, two former TC members and very active researchers in the IFS field, Pierre Moulin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Ton Kalker (DTS Inc.), were elected as the Signal Processing Society’s Distinguished Lecturers for the year 2012.

As always, when spring comes it is time for ICASSP, that this year was held in Kyoto from March 25 to March 30. Following a consolidated tradition, the major awards of the SPS society have been announced during the opening ceremony of ICASSP. Even this year, a prestigious awards was assigned to a paper nominated by the IFS-TC: Tanya Ignatenko and Frans M. J. Willems received the best paper award for the paper entitled, "Biometric Systems: Privacy and Secrecy Aspects," published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Volume 4, Number 4, December 2009. In addition, TC member Shih-Fu Chang was selected to receive a Meritorious Service Award for his significant contributions to the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine as Editor-in-Chief (jointly with his successor Li Deng).

During ICASSP 2012, 52 SPS member were congratulated for their elevation to the grade of IEEE Fellow. For seven of them, the elevation was motivated by contributions in the field of information forensics and security: Oscar Au (for contributions to multimedia coding and security), Mauro Barni (for contributions to signal and image processing for multimedia security), Jean-Luc Dugelay (for contributions to three dimensional imaging for security applications), Patrick Flynn (for contributions to biometric identification), Ching-Yung Lin (for contributions to network science and multimedia security and retrieval), Salil Prabhakar (for contributions to biometrics technology), Wenjun Zeng (for contributions to multimedia communication and security).

Led by the new Editor-in-Chief and TC member C-C. Jay Kuo, the TC actively involved in providing inputs to the EDICS updates of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS) in early 2012. Similar updates were also made to the ICASSP EDICS in IFS topic areas.

Having scanned the past we are ready to look into the future. The fourth edition of the IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) is approaching. Established only three years ago, WIFS has rapidly become one of the major events for security-oriented researchers, especially, but not only for those active in fields intersecting signal processing. This year, WIFS'12 will be held in Tenerife (Canarie Islands, Spain) on 2-5 December 2012. Four tutorials have been selected and will be offered as a prelude to the main workshop program. The tutorial topics include: “A primer on content protection systems” (G. Doërr, A. Durand, and T. Kalker), “Cloud computing for network forensics” (by J. François), “Biometric privacy and secrecy from information-theoretical perspective” (by T. Ignatenko), and “Uncovering the processing history of video content” (by S. Milani, and A. Piva). Continuing the encouraging growth from past editions, WIFS’12 has attracted a record number of submission, 35% higher than the successful event last year. Technical review is underway. We welcome everybody to consider coming to the beautiful Tenerife to attend the WIFS to present or learn about the latest developments in the IFS field.