Activity Update from the IFS-TC

Published in TC News on 1 March 2016

Activity Update from the IFS-TC

Contributed by Wade Trappe

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 organization of the 2016 Signal Processing Cup, the nomination and election of societal awards, and the organization of the next installment of IFS’s flagship workshop WIFS’16. Additionally, the field of information forensics and security was recognized in the by the broader technical community with an Emmy at CES being awarded to four companies for their contributions to forensics technologies.

Multimedia Forensics in the News:

The IFS community is raising the flag and celebrating the noteworthy impact of its research! Recently, the field of steganography and watermarking received recognition for the impact it has had upon the audio and video industries. Four companies (Nielson, Civolution, Digimarc and Verance) were recognized on January 8th, 2016 at the 67th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards with a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award, which was presented at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The technology developed by those working in the field of information forensics and security has helped stop the spread of piracy and protected the valuable creative work produced by artists all over the world.

For more information on the Emmy Award, please see http://emmyonline.com/tech_67th_recipients .

IFS Highlighted in the 2016 Signal Processing Cup at ICASSP Shanghai:

Following the success of the 2014 and 2015 Signal Processing Cups, the 2016 Signal Processing Cup will shift its topic towards the field of information forensics. The SP Cup aims to provide undergraduate students with opportunities to form teams and work together to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem using signal processing techniques. The 2016 SP Cup will be held in March 2016 at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP,www.icassp2016.org/) in Shanghai, China.

The 2016 SP Cup competition topic involves analyzing the time-varying location-dependent signature of signals from the power grid that are captured in media recordings. The topic is at the intersection between signal processing and information security/forensics, and teams aim to showcase their algorithmic (and forensic) skills in tracking down where multimedia files were recorded.

The final round of the 2016 Signal Processing Cup will take place in Shanghai in March 2016, as three finalist teams battle it out for fame and prizes! Join us as we cheer on the finalists!

For more information on the 2016 SP Cup, please see http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/community/sp-cup/ .

Members of the IFS Community Recognized with Societal Awards

Several members of the IFS community will receive societal award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society at ICASSP 2016. Min Wu will receive the IEEE SPS Meritorious Service Award “for her exemplary service to and leadership in the Signal Processing Society.”  K.J. Ray Liu, a co-founder of the IFS TC and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)  will receive the IEEE Leon K. Krichmayer Graduate Teaching Award for Signal Processing "for exemplary teaching and curriculum development, inspirational mentoring of graduate students, and broad educational impact in signal processing and communications."

IFS researchers will also receive two Best Paper awards:

• Xiaoyang Tan and Bill Triggs, "Enhanced Local Texture Feature Sets for Face Recognition Under Difficult Lighting Conditions", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 19, No. 6, June 2010.

• Tomás Pevný, Patrick Bas and Jessica Fridrich, "Steganalysis by Subtractive Pixel Adjacency Matrix", IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Volume 5, No. 2, June 2010.

Also, the long-term impact and importance of the field of information forensics is being recognized in the Sustained Impact Paper Award. The Sustained Impact Paper Award is given to the authors of a journal article of broad interest that has had a sustained impact over many years in the field of signal processing and has resulted in a notable paradigm shift in how a problem is tackled.  This year’s Sustained Impact Paper Award is being awarded to the paper:

• Ingemar J. Cox, Joe Kilian, F. Thomson Leighton and Talal Shamoon, for "Secure Spread Spectrum Watermarking for Multimedia ", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 6, No. 12, December 1997.

WIFS 2016 to be held in Abu Dhabi

WIFS’16: The IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) is the flagship 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 in the field of information forensics and security. WIFS’16 will feature keynotes, tutorials, special sessions, and lecture & poster sessions. WIFS’16 also represents a noteworthy partnership between the IEEE SPS IFS TC and the IEEE Biometrics Council.

For more information related to WIFS 2016, please see http://wifs2016.mdabaie.com/ .