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Multimedia Security and Forensics

The Multimedia Security and Forensics (MSF) Group focuses on the interplay among multimedia, security and forensics technologies, which cover research on digital watermarking and authentication, data hiding, steganography and steganalysis, multimedia content protection, and their applications for image, video, audio and binary content. Recent work on image forensics has also attracted much attention from this group including camera identification, anomaly detection, image forgery and tamper detection. Some other research directions recently developed in the group include digital forensics (not related to multimedia data), usable security involving multimedia and human-computer interface, multimedia coding and visual quality assessment.

Potential applications for digital watermarking and forensics include the usage in the court of law for identifying the origin of unlawful multimedia content, which would go some way to helping witnesses to identify where the blame lie, as well as for use in the proof of ownership and subsequently copyright infringement cases.

The MSF group has currently 18 active members consisting of five academics and 13 PhD students. Some of the group’s research activities have attracted international recognition by winning the prestigious IET innovation in Engineering Award in 2006 for its work on research and commercialization of digital watermarking software. The group also hosted the 8th International Workshop on Digital Watermarking (IWDW’09) at the University of Surrey in 2009. IWDW is a premium conference attended by many of the experts and researchers in the field of multimedia security.

Research Funding and Collaborations 

Research within MSF has been funded by the EPSRC, The Royal Society, the UK Home Office and by industrial collaborators including Thales UK Research and Technology, Charteris plc, and Intellas UK Ltd. Some of the projects funded include error control watermarking, digital and multimedia forensics, formal methods and analysis for digital watermarking protocols. Over last few years, strong research collaboration has been established with many universities in Europe, USA and Asia.

Research Areas

Research activities of the MSF group can be categorized into the following main areas:

  • Digital Watermarking and Authentication: robust semi-fragile and fragile watermarking, error-control watermarking, copyright protection of multimedia content, content integrity and verification, self-recovery and restoration, perceptual quality metric and assessment, print and scan analysis, formal methods and analysis of buyer-seller watermarking security protocols.
  • Steganography and Steganalysis: data hiding, spatial and transform domain embedding and detection techniques, support vector machine and classification techniques, multimedia steganography (audio, image and video), binary document and text data hiding.
  • Multimedia Forensics: image and video forensics, camera identification, Benford’s Law, statistical analysis, anomaly detection, forgery and tamper detection, false detection rate, glare and HDR image identification.

  • Usable Security: CAPTCHAs, graphical passwords, human authentication against observation attacks, enhanced (visual) HCI for security purpose (e.g., anti-phishing or anti-malware), security visualization, applications of fractals and chaos in computer security.
  • Copyright (C) Shujun Li @ www.hooklee.com
    Multimedia Coding and Visual Quality Assessment: recovery of missing information in DCT-transformed images and videos, reconfigurable video coding and its applications in cryptography, objective image and video quality assessment, characterization of image capturing devices and displays, multimedia wireless sensor networks.

Selected Videos from SULFA

SULFA is the Surrey University Library for Forensic Analysis, an open video database maintained by the MSF Group for video forensics research. The following are four selected videos from the library. More detail can be found at SULFA web site.

Original Video 1: Street View

Forged Video 1: Street View

Original Video 2: Sitting Man

Forged Video 2: Sitting Man