Special Sessions

  • "From Biometric to Forensics", chaired by Chang-Tsun Li and Massimo Tistarelli.

    Forensics is the application of a wide range of sciences and technologies to answer questions in relation to criminal or a civil cases. Many such questions boil down to identifying or verifying the identity of people allegedly involved. Therefore there is a strong link between biometrics and forensics. The main mission of the Special Session on From Biometrics to Forensics is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners of these two closely related areas to exchange experience and to pave the way for cross-fertilisation of ideas. Manuscripts describing work in the intersection of these two areas are most welcome. We also encourage submissions of work of one individual area with implication of the other. 

  • "End User and  Signal Processing: a successful synergy towards the assessment of forensic tools", chaired by Marco Carli (detailed cfp):

    The goal of this special session is to provide updated overview of the latest trends and developments in Forensics and to start a multi-disciplinary discussion for understanding the impact of the end user on the signal processing based forensic tools. Topics/Techniques include but are not limited to :

- Human Vision or Human interaction for understanding the impact of user in the effectiveness of forensic tools
- Human Vision inspired Signal processing methods for forensics applications 
- Exploiting user in forensics application
- Crowd based forensic tools
- Unsupervised and supervised forensic tools
- User validation for forensic tools
- Forensic techniques limit
- Quality assessment of forensic tools

  • "Media encryption", chaired by Andreas Uhl (detailed cfp):

    Multimedia applications are omnipresent in our daily lives. While creating and copying digital data using such applications has never been easier, privacy and security concerns arise in both, the private and the public domain. The encryption of multimedia data is one way of addressing these issues.

    This special session covers the full spectrum of multimedia encryption, ranging from the encryption of different formats - images, video, 3-D graphics and others - and the assessment of their security to the transmission and management of the encrypted data. Furthermore, it aims at covering approaches which combine both, information hiding and multimedia encryption, which is one of the main objectives of the 1st ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security of which this special session is a part.

  • "Moving steganography and steganalysis from the laboratory to the real world", chaired by Andrew Ker.

    The traditional steganalytic scenario usually involves a steganalyst trying to detect whether a single object carries payload or not, and such a scenario is common in most literature. In practice, one can expect to consider a rather different scenario, where the detector has to consider a payload spread between multiple covers. 

    The problem of detecting data hidden in a mixture of cover and stego objects, is known as "pooled steganalysis". In the other side, the problem of how to best spread payload between multiple covers is known as "batch steganography".

    This special session aims at exploring the two parts of this new motivant topic.  This special session will treat but is not limited to experimental benchmarking, game theory, classifiers of low complexity, large databases, problem of cover-source mismatch...

    Key words: Batch steganography / Pooled steganalysis, Embedding Strategies, Game theory, Multi-Actor, Benchmarking, Learning, Large Data Sets, Anomaly Detection, Source-Cover Mismatch...