Activity Update from the IFS-TC

Contributed by Patrick Bas (IFS Liaison to eNewsletter)

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. The main activities addressed this year were the outcomes of the first IEEE Image Forensics Challenge, the organization and future organization of the two IFS workshops WIFS’14 and WIFS’15, and the nomination of the next IEEE TIFS Editor in Chief.

The IFS-TC is more and more social:

Six months after its launch, the IFS-TC has 89 members on LinkedIn and 44 friends on Facebook. Note that each message news coming from the IFS-TC is automatically redirected to the IFS Facebook page, the IFS Linkedin group and the twitter account or the RSS feed.

IFS topics are hype in conferences:

The IFS sessions have reached a high number of submissions this year with 122 papers submitted to ICASSP this year (93 in 2013) and 296 in ICIP (229 in 2013). WIFS is also going well with more than 100 submissions each year.

Community:

The IFS-TC Image Forensics Challenge is still going on!

After the success of the first IEEE IFS-TC Image Forensics Challenge, the organising committee has decided to expand the challenge website as a Web Service.
Anyone who is interested in submitting a paper either to conferences or to journals and validating their algorithms with the images of both phases of the challenge can do so login in the submission system. Full record of the submissions with live updates of all authors as well as their ranking will be maintained and two rankings will be available:
- the Live Ranking: this ranking shows the top teams so far, counting from today.
- the Challenge Ranking: this ranking shows the top teams during the challenge.
With that, let's hope we'll push forward the current 40% best detection/localisation rate in the next years!

New IFS-TC subcommittees

For 2014, the subcommittees of the IFS-TC have been organised, you can find the list of committee members on http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/ifs-tc/...

Three SPS fellows belong to the IFS community

Each year, the IEEE Board of Directors confers the grade of Fellow on up to one-tenth of one percent of the members. To qualify for consideration, an individual must have been a Member, normally for five years or more, and a Senior Member at the time for nomination to Fellow. The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in IEEE’s designated fields.
Three SPS fellows belong to the IFS community
- Mohan Kankanhalli, Singapore, Singapore: for contributions to multimedia content processing and security.
- Fatih Porikli, Cambridge, Massachusetts: for contributions to computer vision and video surveillance.
- Wade Trappe, North Brunswick, New Jersey: for contributions to information and communication security.

The new Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) has been nominated

Prof Mauro Barni has been appointed by the IEEE Signal Processing Society Executive Committee as the new EiC for T-IFS. His term will be from Jan. 1, 2015 to Dec. 31, 2017.
Pr M. Barni was the Chair of the IFS Technical Committee from 2011 to 2012. He was also an Associate Editor of T-IFS from 2010 to 2013, and the Technical Program Chair of ICASSP 2014 in Florence.

Conferences:

IFS special sessions in ICIP 2014

The International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP'14) will be held in Paris (France). Note that, beside regular IFS sessions, 3 sessions are directly linked to, or touch Information Forensics and Security:
- 3D Data Security, organised by William Puech and Adrian Bors
- Privacy-Preserving Multimedia Content Analysis: Privacy by Design and Social-Impact Analysis, organised by Atta Badii, Touradj Ebrahimi, Jean-Luc Dugelay, Ebroul Izquierdo, Thomas Sikora, Leon Hempel, Christian Fedorczak, and Diego Fernandez Vazquez
- Advances in Facial Morpho-Functional Sign Recognition and Analysis Behavior Imaging, organised by A. Enis Cetin, Sara Colantonio, and Bogdan J. Matuszewski

WIFS - IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security, Editions 2014 and 2015

WIFS’14: The IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) is the primary annual event organized by the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee. The objective of WIFS is to provide the most prominent venue for researchers to exchange ideas and identify potential areas of collaboration. WIFS'14 will feature keynotes, tutorials, special sessions, and lecture & poster sessions. For the first time ever, WIFS is being organized with IEEE GlobalSIP, giving the WIFS community the opportunity to attend a rich selection of research symposia in addition to WIFS. Note that WIFS 2014 will feature a Special Topic: Security and Internet of Things!
Two calls are still going on: one on work in progress papers and the other one on presentations of journal papers.

WIFS’15: The Technical Committee on Information Forensics and Security (IFS-TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) is currently inviting proposals for the seventh offering of its flagship workshop (WIFS 2015), to be held in Fall/Winter 2015. Any applicant can contact the IEEE IFS-TC WIFS sub-committee.