News from the IFS TC

By Shantanu Rane (Liaison to eNews for the IFS TC)

The mission of the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS TC) is to promote activities within the broad technical areas of information forensics and security. These activities involve organization of the IFS track within ICASSP, organization of the Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) and overseeing the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), organizing competitions in various IFS fields, and much more. This report summarizes the TC's activities within the last six months.

IEEE WIFS: A Rising Star

The 4th Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS 2012) concluded recently in Tenerife, Spain. The workshop continues to grow in visibility within the IFS and broader signal processing community, and now encompasses a wide variety of topics including biometrics, watermarking, steganography, encrypted-domain signal processing, anonymous statistics, side-channel attacks, network forensics, physical layer security, and related topics. The workshop featured 4 tutorials, 3 keynote speeches, 39 oral presentations, 19 posters and 8 demonstrations. The conference was a resounding success thanks to the efforts of the General Chairs Fernando Pérez-González and Pierre Moulin, the Technical Program Chairs Patrizio Campisi and Deepa Kundur, and the Local Arrangements Chair Juan Trujillo Sevilla.

The technical program committee granted the Best Paper Award to Thijs Laarhoven, Jan-Jaap Oosterwijk and Jeroen Doumen for their paper titled "Dynamic Traitor Tracing for Arbitrary Alphabets: Divide and Conquer", and the Best Student Paper Award to Pascal Schöttle for his paper, co-authored by Stefan Korff and Rainer Böhme, titled "Weighted Stego-Image Steganalysis for Naive Content-Adaptive Embedding". In addition, the European project REWIND funded an Award for an outstanding paper on Multimedia Forensics, which was granted to Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen, Giulia Boato and Francesco G.B. De Natale for their paper titled "Identify Computer Generated Characters by Analysing Facial Expressions Variation".

During Fall, the TC voted for the next edition of the workshop and selected the proposal led by Ton Kalker and Jiwu Huang to host the event in Guangzhou, China. This will be the first time that WIFS goes to Asia and we encourage all interested researchers to submit regular papers, tutorials, and special sessions.

Fresh Blood in IFS TC

The TC elected 11 new members this year from various fields, including Adnan Alattar from Digimarc, Oscar Au from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hervé Chabanne from Morpho, Sen-Ching Cheung from the University of Kentucky, Pedro Comesaña Alfaro from the University of Vigo, Tomas Filler from Digimarc, Chiou-Ting Hsu from National Tsing Hua University, Jiangtao Li from Intel, Sharath Pankanti from IBM, Arun Ross from West Virginia University and Athanasios Skodras from Hellenic Open University.

In addition to the induction of new members, Gwenaël Doërr of Technicolor was elected the new Vice-Chair of the TC. As always, the TC encourages researchers and practitioners interested in IFS areas to obtain information about TC activities and to  participate in them by signing up as Affiliate Members at no cost.

SPS Distinguished Lecturer Award

The TC is delighted to note that its past Chair, Prof. Mauro Barni of the University of Sienna has been named as one of the 2013 Distinguished Lecturers of the Signal Processing Society. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides the means for IEEE Chapters to have access to well-known educators and authors in the fields of signal processing to lecture at Chapter meetings. Chapters interested in arranging lectures by the Distinguished Lecturers can obtain information from the Society’s web page or by sending an e-mail message to sp.info@ieee.org.

IFS Resources Page for Reproducible Research

Over the past six months, the TC has been collecting information about public domain databases that would enable research and experimentation in IFS areas. Currently, these include fingerprint, face and iris biometrics, image and video forensics, steganography, anti-counterfeiting research. Our aim is to construct a comprehensive resource for IFS researchers around the world and to foster reproducible research in IFS areas. All interested readers are invited to see the IFS Resources Page as it continues to grow. Any recommendations about new resources that are not currently on the page, should be sent to Shantanu Rane or Gwenaël Doerr through the IFS contact form.

Finally, on behalf of all the IFS TC members, I would like to wish you all the best for the upcoming year 2013.