Activity Update from the IFS-TC

Published in TC News on 1 October 2016

Contributed by Wade Trappe and Matthias Kirchner

Activity Update from 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.

IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2016 successfully completed

Following the success of the 2014 and 2015 editions, the IEEE Signal Processing (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 competition shifted its focus on a topic in the field of information forensics, which involved analyzing the time-varying location-dependent signature of signals from the power grid that are captured in media recordings. The topic at the intersection between signal processing and information security/forensics let students showcase their algorithmic and hardware design skills in tracking down where multimedia files were recorded.

SP Cup 2016 engaged participants from nearly 30 countries, covering every habitable continent. Three hundred thirty-four students from 23 countries and forming 52 teams registered for the competition. Among them, more than 200 students on 33 teams turned in the required submissions by the open competition deadline in January 2016. The final round of the 2016 SP Cup was held in March 2016 at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP, http://www.icassp2016.org) in Shanghai, China. The three top teams were selected from the initial round of competition and provided travel grants to participate in the final competition. The Grand Prize went to Team “Resonance_1011” from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology. Team “Hammer Down” from Purdue University secured the Second Prize, followed by Team “Vidyut”, a joint effort from three institutions in India (IISc, IIT-Madras, NITK). The September issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine features a detailed report covering the highlights from the IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2016. Congratulations to the winners!

T-IFS impact keeps growing

As every year in June, Thomson Reuters has released the new citation reports. The impact factor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS) for 2015 (based on citations received in 2015 by papers published in 2014 and 2013) is 2.441 (growing from 2.408 in 2015 and 2.065 in 2014). The quality of T-IFS publications is also recognized by Google Scholar, which ranks T-IFS as the second most influential publication venue in the “Computer Security & Cryptography” category (#3 in 2015 and #5 in 2014).

Multimedia Forensics in the News:

IFS research is having an impact on the media world! 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 .

The long-term impact and importance of the field of information forensics was recognized in the Sustained Impact Paper Award this year. 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 was 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

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 also represents a noteworthy partnership between the IEEE SPS IFS TC and the IEEE Biometrics Council. Now in its 8th edition, WIFS’16 will be held in Abu Dhabi (UAE), December 4-7, 2016. The event will feature keynotes, tutorials, special sessions, and lecture & poster sessions.

For more information related to WIFS 2016, please see http://www.wifs2016.org.

Details of the technical program are to be made public within the next weeks. Stay tuned!