Activity Update from the IFS-TC

by Patrick Bas (IFS Liaison to eNewsletter)

IFS was well represented at ICASSP in Vancouver, Canada, with 93 submissions and 47 papers selected from a reviewing process involving at least 3 reviewers. An original session on Adversarial Signal Processing chaired by M. Barni and F. Perez-Gonzalez was also presented during the conference. The Signal Processing Society awards for 2012 were also presented during ICASSP. The IFS TC was glad to see that several of its nominations were successful:

• Mauro Barni becomes one of SPS Distinguished Lecturers for the period 2013-2014. He will offer lectures on signal processing in the encrypted domain, digital watermarking, multimedia forensics, and distributed compression of hyperspectral imagery.
• Yagiz Sutcu, Qiming Liand, and Nasir Memon received a SPS Best Paper Award for their paper titled, "Protecting Biometric Templates with Sketch: Theory and Practice", published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Volume 2, Number 3, December 2007.
• Robert Wilson, David Tse, and Robert A. Scholtz also received a SPS Best Paper Award for their paper titled, "Channel Identification: Secret Sharing Using Reciprocity in Ultrawideband Channels", published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Volume 2, Number 3, December 2007.

The IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) will be held in Guangzhou, located in the north of the Pearl River delta, an important trading center as well as a busy port and the capital city of the Guangdong province. It lies close to the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and Macau. WIFS is the primary annual event organized by the IEEE SPS Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IEEE IFS TC). The submission deadline is the 30th of June, (from 4 to 6 pages IEEE conference format). More information is available on the conference website.

The IEEE Challenge on Image Forensics has started. The First Image Forensics Challenge is an international competition organized by the IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) that will take place from June 2013. The project aims to provide students the opportunity to showcase and pit their skills in a rigorous competition in the application of digital image processing. The challenge comprises several original images captured from different digital cameras with various scenes either indoor or outdoor. The images are divided into images which we call "pristine" or "never manipulated" and images we call "forged" or "fakes". The "forged" images comprise a set of different manipulation techniques such as copy/pasting and splicing with different degrees of photorealism. The challenge started the first of June and will end in December 2013. More information is available on the contest website.