Special issue on multimedia analysis and security

Authors: Shiguo Lian Sergio Velastin

Publish Date: 2010/09/01

Volume: 57, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-4

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Abstract

Multimedia analysis aims to provide various means to understand multimedia content automatically Although it is still a challenging topic various achievements have been obtained and used in practical applications eg contentbased image search automatic news program segmentation and automatic sports highlight extraction Especially some multimedia analysis techniques are potential for securityrelated applications eg intelligent surveillance based on event detection sensitive content detection/filtering based on content understanding and mining piracy tracking based on content fingerprinting and person identification based on biometric recognition This field is attracting more and more researchers However few special issues on journals have been organizedThis special issue aims to expose the readership to the latest research results on Multimedia Analysis and Security It includes a number of related topics demonstrates pioneer work investigates novel solutions and discussed the future trends in this field This issue is composed of six papers selected from 22 submissions Each paper is reviewed by at least two experts with at least two roundsSome of the papers are recommended by 2009 International Conference on Multimedia Information NEtworking and Security MINES 2009 http//lisswhueducn/mines2009/ which aims to provide a platform for worldwide researchers and engineers to exchange the latest research results on multimedia information services with the focuses on networking and security This conference keeps the paper acceptance rate of 40 The recommended best papers have at least 40 difference from the conference paperThe first paper “Image Similarity From Syntax to Weak Semantics” by J Perkio et al investigates the measurement of image similarity which is important for such applications as media search copy detection piracy tracing etc In this paper the authors examined the use of simple syntactic image features lower level and context free combined with other multimodal features to derive a similarity measure that captures the weak semantics of an image in order to solve the problem that the semantic higher contextual level features are still difficult to obtained The weak semantics can be seen as an intermediate step between low level image understanding and full semantic image understanding The measure is tested for multimedia retrieval task on a tv series data which shows how different modalities relate to each other This paper provides valuable information to researchers in multimedia analysisIn the second paper “An Algorithmic Analysis of Zernike Moments in the Presence of Rotation with Crop and Loose Modes” by S Xiang Zernike moments’ performance against rotations is investigated Zernike moments have some desirable properties such as rotational invariance noise robust and efficient representation of pattern and are often used in pattern recognition and robust watermarking In both theoretical and experimental ways this paper analyzes the effect of image rotations including crop rotation and loose rotation on Zernike moments and proposes the solutions to extract better Zernike moments For example for the crop rotation it suggests to extract the Zernike moments by mapping the image over a disc instead of inside a circle since the outside of an image after the crop rotation will be distorted For the loose rotation a preprocessing step ie image size normalization will be introduced in order to eliminate the effect of image size change Experimental results show the improved Zernike moments computing methods get some apparent advantagesThe third paper “Content Distribution and Copyright Authentication Based on Combined Indexing and Watermarking” by S Lian et al proposes a media content distribution and copyright authentication system based on both media index and watermarking techniques Before media distribution the media content is marked by embedding the customer information and the robust features used both for media index and content emendation are extracted from the watermarked media and registered in a feature database To detect whether a media content over Internet is copyrightprotected or not a watermark is extracted from the media and compared with the original one If the watermark is not found a robust feature is computed from the media and matched with the feature database The matching result gives the operation parameters that are used to emend the media content After media emendation a watermark is extracted again and used to authenticate the copyright Experimental results show that the combination of media index and watermark detection can improve the detection rate greatly This paper tells an interesting research topic of detecting piracy by combining media index and watermarkingIn the fourth paper “Watermarking Geographical Data on Spatial Topological Relations” by C Wang et al a watermarking algorithm is proposed to protect the copyright of geographical data With the wide application of geographical data the copyright protection of geographical data becomes a hot research topic In this paper the spatial topological relation existing between polygons is chosen as cover data and the watermark is embedded by slightly modifying the metric measure of spatial topological relation and some geographical objects are scaled to derive the watermarked data To measure the distortions caused by watermark embedding Global Main Scaling Distance is introduced The comparative results show that the proposed algorithm has some good performances eg a good robustness against geometrical attacks simplification interpolation etc and a good tradeoff between robustness and fidelity is acquiredThe fifth paper “ParameterEstimation and AlgorithmSelection Based UnitedJudgment for Image Steganalysis” by J Lu et al investigates steganalysis algorithms that are used to detect whether the secret message is transmitted via the carrier eg text image video audio etc Considering that there exist various steganalysis algorithms this paper synthetically utilize multiple existing algorithms to construct unitedjudgment methods For example the principles are proposed to select multiple algorithms and parameters accordingly In evaluations both the blind and specific steganalysis are investigated Various experiments are done and the results show that the proposed algorithms achieve more reliable detectionIn the sixth paper “What are suspicious VoIP delays” by W Mazurczyk et al the steganalysis in VoIP networks is investigated Since Voice over IP VoIP is now one of the most popular realtime services in IP networks it is also adopted by anonymous users to transmit secret information via information hiding techniques Considering that the modification of an RTP packet stream may lead to packet delay reordering or intentionally lost the information hiding in VoIP may be detectable Motivated by this point the paper examines real RTP traffic traces eg telling what the “normal” delays in RTP packet streams look like and what the steganographic one differs And thus shows the potential means to detect steganographic exchanges in VoIP This paper mentions an interesting research topicThe guest editors wish to thank Prof Borko Furht for providing the opportunity to edit this special issue on Multimedia Analysis and Security and Ms Laura A Lander Ms Maria Mhanilet de Leon and Ms Monalisa Castaneda for providing latest publishing information and making this issue published We would also like to thank the authors for submitting their works as well as the referees who have critically evaluated the papers within the short stipulated time Finally we hope the reader will share our joy and find this special issue very useful

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