Activity Update from the IFS-TC

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 run of the first IEEE Image Forensics Challenge, the organization and future organization of the two IFS workshops WIFS’13 and WIFS’14, the election of new IFS members, and promotion of a special Issue on Biometrics in the Wild in coordination with the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, and more.

The contest was organized in two phases, each one being 3 months long. During the first phase, the participants were asked to decide whether each image of the testing set was original or manipulated, by submitting a binary answer for each testing image. In the second phase, the participants were asked to localize forged areas in each fake image of the test set, by submitting a binary map file for each testing image.

Eight research teams actively took part to the contest. The winners of the first phase obtained a score of 0.942 classification accuracy whereas the winner of the second phase obtained a score of 0.407, thereby confirming that the tampering localization problem is far from being solved. The challenge website will remain open so that forensics researchers can easily benchmark their new algorithms. A more detailed report of the challenge has been published on the IFS website.

WIFS’13 was held from November 18 to November 21 2013 in Guangzhou, China. Beside the very good scientific quality of the 48 scientific presentations presented there (37 oral presentations, 8 work in progress poster presentations and 3 demos), the attendees will remember:

• The three inspiring keynote talks: Jaap Haitsma (Civolution, Netherlands) showcase how simple Matlab research source code for watemrarking and fingerprinting has been converted into a successful company; Pierangela Samarati (Università degli studi di Milano, Italy) presented the security and privacy challenges in the cloud and how to tackle them; Nasir Memon - (NYU-Poly, USA) discussed new authentication paradigms for devices without keyboard, e.g. using touch screen or leap motion.
• The two paper awards given to: X. Zhao, N. Evans, and J-L. Dugelay, for the paper "Unsupervised Multi-view Reduction with application to Audio-Visual Speaker Retrieval", and B. DeCann and A. Ross, for the paper "Deduplication Errors in a Biometric system: An Investigative Study".
• And of course the official and (non-official) social events: The cruise on the pearl river, the gala dinner, and the karaoke.

Note that WIFS will go back to the US in 2014 and will be held under the GlobalSIP umbrella in Atlanta.

Nine new members of the IEEE IFS Technical committee have been elected for the period 2014-2016. The election process was competitive, involving 20 applicants. The elected members are:

• T. Charles Clancy from Virginia Tech,
• Jana Dittmann from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg,
• Y.-W. Peter from Hong National Tsing Hua University,
• Tanya Ignatenko from Eindhoven University of Technology,
• Matthias Kirchner from University of Münster,
• Hitoshi Kiya Tokyo from Metropolitan University,
• Negar Kiyavash from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
• Ashwin Swaminathan from Qualcomm Research,
• Marco Tagliasacchi from Politecnico di Milano.

There is an on-going call for papers for the IEEE TIFS special issue on Facial Biometrics in the Wild. It will focus on the theoretical foundation of facial information modelling and analysis, novel algorithms and systems, and multidisciplinary perspectives and applications of facial biometrics. Manuscripts are to be submitted according to the Information for Authors using the IEEE online manuscript system, Manuscript Central. Papers must not have appeared or be under review elsewhere. Manuscripts by the guest editors submitted to this SI will be handled by the EIC of IEEE-TIFS.

Schedule:

• Submission deadline: February 15, 2014
• First Review: June 1, 2014
• Revisions Due: July 15, 2014

More news...

Alex Kot has been nominated SPS Distinguished Lecturer for year 2014-2015.

A TC member, Wade Trappe, was elected IEEE Fellow Class of 2014.

Starting January 2014, Min Wu will complete her TC chair’s term and start a one-year Past Chair position. Gwenaël Doërr will become TC Chair.

The impact factor of T-IFS has increased by more than 0.5 point, from 1.340 (2011) to 1.895 (2012).

The rank of T-IFS among all journals in the category of “Engineering: Electric and Electronic” has increased too, from #97 (2011) to #54 (2012).

The IFS-TC news is now automatically redirected to the IFS Facebook page, the IFS Linkedin group and the twitter account or the RSS feed.