Summary

"Steganography" refers to the science of "invisible" communication. Unlike cryptography, where the goal is to secure communications from an eavesdropper, steganographic techniques strive to hide the very presence of the message itself from an observer. Although steganography is an ancient subject, given the proliferation of digital images, and given the high degree of redundancy present in a digital representation of an image (despite compression), there has been an increased interest in using digital images as cover-objects for the purpose of steganography.

In this context, "Steganalysis" refers to the body of techniques that aid in distinguishing between cover-objects and stego-objects. The development of techniques for image steganography and the wide-spread availability of tools for the same have led to an increased interest in steganalysis techniques for image data. The last two years, for example, have seen many new and powerful steganalysis techniques reported in the literature. In this talk, we will present a broad overview of recent developments in steganalysis. We will highlight the progress that has been made and the questions that still need better answers.

Biography

Nasir Memon is an Associate Professor in the computer science department at Polytechnic University, New York. Prof. Memon's research interests include Data Compression, Computer and Network Security and Multimedia Communication, Computing and Security. He has published more than 150 articles in journals and conference proceedings and holds two patents in image compression. He has been the principal investigator on several funded research projects sponsored by NSF, AFOSR, AFRL, HP, Intel, Panasonic and Mitsubishi. He was a visiting faculty at Hewlett-Packard Research Labs during the academic year 1997-98.

He has won several awards including the NSF CAREER award in 1997 and the Jacobs Excellence in Education award in 2002. He was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (98-01), and is currently serving in the same position for the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal and the Journal of Electronic Imaging. He is also serving as a guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing special issue on Multimedia security, for the Signal Processing Journal special issue on Security of Data Hiding Technologies and for the European Journal on Applied Signal Processing special issue on Multimedia Security and Rights Management.

For more information contact: Yun Shi shi@njit.edu (973)-596-3501, Alfredo Tan tan@fdu.edu (201) 692-2347, and Hong Man hman@stevens-tech.edu (201)-216-5038.