Keynote Speech

Tracing back the processing history of multimedia content

When observing an image or a video on a web site, often people do not realize that such media have undergone a long series of transformations before appearing in the current form.
Recovering the correct sequence of processing steps or, in short, the processing history of an image or a video, is an important task in multimedia forensics. A natural application is to verify whether the recovered history is consistent in different spatial or temporal portions of the same image or video, which can be a direct proof of manipulation of the original medium.
The main challenge in audio, image and video processing history recovery is that one usually does not have access to the original media. Nevertheless, each of the processing operations usually leave a trace on the final signal. By tracking those traces, it is often possible to recover a sequence of processing steps, that, even if approximated, is still useful to reconstruct the actual processing history.
In this talk, the most useful traces that can be used for audio image and video processing history recovery, and the main forensic techniques that are based on them, will be described. Due to the ubiquitous diffusion of compressed audio files, images and videos, major focus will be given to traces relying on specific properties of the compression process.

Alessandro Piva received his Ph.D. degree in "Computer Science and Telecommunications Engineering" from the University of Florence on 1999. From 2002 until 2004 he was Research Scientist at the National Inter-university Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT). Since 2005 he's with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Florence.
His research interests lie in the areas of Information Forensics and Security, and of Image and Video Processing. In particular, he was interested in digital watermarking techniques for digital images and video sequences; then he studied new methods for signal processing in the encrypted domain. He is now working to the development of multimedia forensic techniques. In the above research topics he has been co-author of more than 35 papers published in international journals and 100 papers published in international conference proceedings.
He is lecturer for the course "Image Processing and Protection" of the Laurea Degree in Telecommunications Engineering of the University of Florence.
He is IEEE Senior Member, and he was IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee Member; he serves as Associate Editor of the, of the IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, of the EURASIP Journal on Information Security and of the LNCS Trans. on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, and he served as AE of the IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security and of IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. He was Technical Co-Chair of IEEE MMSP2004, Program Co-Chair of 2nd ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSEC14), Publications Chair of IEEE WIFS 2013, co-Publications Co-Chair of IEEE ICASSP2014. He also was Co-Organizer of the First IEEE SPS Italy Chapter Summer School on Signal Processing, held on September 2013.

Security and privacy challenges at border between cyber and physical worlds

Due to developments of the Internet of Things, computers, sensors and their networks are located in all places, and useful services can now be received at all times and in all spaces of our lives. On the other hand, however, there is now the actual problem at border between cyber and physical worlds that personal and confidential information is easily shot and shared in a second as a result of the popularization of portable terminals with built-in cameras and other sensors. So far conventional IT security and privacy focus on cyber world. Establishing security and privacy countermeasures are now essential requirements at border between cyber and physical worlds.
In this talk, our security challenges for overcoming analog-hole problems; techniques to prevent unauthorized copying of screens and displays utilizing the difference the differences in spectral sensitivity characteristics between human beings and imaging devices will be described. Our recent privacy challenges for preventing privacy invasion through face detection from camera images through the use of a device (Privacy Visor) worn on the face that appends noise to photographed images which makes faces in images undetectable without affecting human visibility. For each challenge, testing of a prototype are shown through fruitful demonstrations.

Isao Echizen received B.S., M.S., and D.E. degrees from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1995, 1997, and 2003. He joined Hitachi, Ltd. in 1997 and until 2007 was a research engineer in Hitachi's Systems Development Laboratory. He is currently a professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII). He was a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg in 2010 and a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg and the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 2011. He is currently conducting research in the fields of content security and privacy and of multimedia application systems. He received the President's Technology Award from Hitachi in 2000, the Best Paper Award from the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) in 2005 and 2014, the Best Paper Award at IEEE IIHMSP in 2006, the Fujio Frontier Award and the Image Electronics Technology Award in 2010, and the IPSJ Nagao Special Researcher Award in 2011. In addition, his paper was named "One of the Best Papers" at IFIP SEC 2011.
He is an editorial board member of the Journal of Business & Information Systems Engineering (Wirtschaftsinformatik) and of the Journal of Innovation in Digital Ecosystems, Elsevier, and an associate editor of Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing, Springer. He is a guest editor-in-chief of the Special issue on Enriched Multimedia, IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, and a guest editor of the Special issue on Secure Communications, Telecommunication Systems, Springer. He is a WG Secretary of IFIP TC8-information systems: WG8.4- E-Business Information Systems: Multi-disciplinary research and practice.
He served as a conference co-chair of IIHMSP 2013, program co-chair of IFIP ICT-EURASIA 2014, IIHMSP 2010, and IWSEC 2010, publication co-chair of IWSEC 2007, 2008, 2009, and CANS 2009, and as local arrangement chair of IFIP I3E 2008. He also served as a program committee member for numerous conferences, including those of the ACMMM, ICME, AINA, and ASIPA.

Distributed / Multiple Description Image and Video Coding

Multiple description coding (MDC) and distributed video coding (DVC) are two novel techniques designed to address the problems of conventional image and video compression coding. MDC has emerged as an effective method for video transmission over unreliable and non-prioritized networks. It can effectively combat packet loss without retransmission, thus satisfying the demand of real time services and relieving the network congestion. DVC is a new video coding framework based on Slepian-Wolf and Wyner-Ziv theories, its main goal is to achieve low-complexity encoding to meet the demands of friendly uplink communication services, possibly at the expense of high-complexity decoding.
In the talk, we will first introduce the concept, the basic principle and implementation of the MDC and DVC. Then we will survey the state-of-the-art and analyze the challenging problems of the two techniques. Finally, we will present some relative works in our lab.

Yao Zhao received the B.S. degree from Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China, in 1989, and the M.E. degree from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 1992, both from the Radio Engineering Department, and the Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU), Beijing, China, in 1996. He became an Associate Professor at BJTU in 1998 and became a Professor in 2001. From 2001 to 2002, he was a Senior Research Fellow with the Information and Communication Theory Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. He is currently the Director of the Institute of Information Science, BJTU. His current research interests include image/video coding, digital watermarking and forensics, and video analysis and understanding. He is leading several national research projects from the 973 Program, 863 Program, and the National Science Foundation of China. He serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, including as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, an Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Area Editor of Signal Processing: Image Communication (Elsevier), and Associate Editor of Circuits, System, and Signal Processing (Springer). He was named a Distinguished Young Scholar by the National Science Foundation of China in 2010 and was elected as a Chang Jiang Scholar of Ministry of Education of China. He is a fellow of IET and a senior member of IEEE.