When Dexter goes to conference

Tonight is the night, welcome party. Be careful, it is hard to find a way among this jungle. Everybody welcomes you with big smiles. Some are sincere, others lie. Some are your friends, some appreciate your work, others are reviewers who nailed down your paper with unfair arguments. But one is never sure. Who is who?

"- Hey! Hello! Are you presenting a paper?"

Strange to ask me such a pretendedly innocuous question right away! Usually one starts with "when did you arrive here?"… This is suspicious. I always attend conference to present a paper luckily accepted. But this conference is the only exception, and therefore his question is very embarrassing. He knows this, he did it in purpose.

Except that I noticed your little game, I am security minded, I see worst case attacks everywhere, I am Dexter. The server cuts cheese with a big knife. And the lake is just nearby. It is time to say goodbye to my 'good friend'. There will be a no-show at this conference.

Invited speakers

How to boost the appeal of a conference which had a relatively low number of submissions?

Here is the trick:

1) Maintain the acceptance ratio as low as possible,

2) Fill the program with sexy invited speaker talks.

Examples:

- Ton Kalker @ MMSP 2010, "Protected Video Distribution in the Networked Age"

- Gabor Tardos @ IH 2010, "Capacity of collusion secure fingerprinting - a tradeoff between rate and efficiency"

- Pim Tuyls @ IH 2010, "Hardware Intrinsic Security"

- Boris Skoric @ IH 2010, "Security with Noisy Data"

Miss cucumber, from the travel agency desk.

About the conferences acceptance rate

In this corner of the ring, the famous IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in its 17th edition, parallel sessions, poster sessions, plenary talks, exhibition hall, so many sponsors that they can't list them, more than a thousand attendees expected, and this year so many submissions that its PC was desperately looking for reviewers from the watermarking community -- even though some of your favorite reviewers didn't get any content security paper to review: that's the sad point in striving (or not being able) to manage such a huge event.

In the opposite corner, the small and dying Information Hiding workshop, single threaded session, no fancy poster, no big head speaking, no exhibition hall, one unique sponsor (Technicolor) and so few submissions that the acceptance rate is likely to be larger than 1/2.

Let us look at previous fights (thanks Google Scholar for the statistics):

• Barni (SPIE 109 cit. , ICIP 87 cit., SPIE 77 cit., SPIE 77 cit.)
• Cachin (IH 425 cit.),
• Cox (IH 347 cit., ICIP 117cit.),
• Delp. (ACM 133 cit., SPIE 123 cit., SPIE 115 cit.)
• Fridrich (SPIE 256 cit., IH 239 cit., IH. 214 cit., ICIP 160 cit., ICIP 100 cit.),
• Kalker (SPIE 199 cit., ICIP 96 cit.)
• Kutter (ICIP 233 cit.)
• Wong (ICIP 310 cit.)

So, which one of two will you attend?

Well, that big foreseen acceptance rate for IH is not very attractive. Some researchers discard such conferences, or are not given credits for their papers published in conference with so big acceptance rate. This is why I say "dying" IH: in our sad times, ROI on advertising might be considered more important than sound research.

HOWEVER, your favorite watermasked cucumbers have been reviewing for both events... and frankly, from what they've read, the IH papers were far, far better.

We do not say that there were all great, but significantly better than ICIP submissions on average (not to say: median). Therefore, judging a conference from its acceptance rate is just as silly as when judgments go on upon only one criterion (notice the alliteration).

Conclusion: if you are solely interested in data hiding and content security, you'd better go to IH. Period.

Miss Cucumber.

Truth hurts

If you want to convince people that digital Forensics can be useful, here is a collection of interesting links.

The most impressive ones are the tampering collection throughout history built by Hany Farid and the museum of Hoaxes.

A smaller and contemporary list can be found on this Spanish web site, and the top ten of doctored photos (a politically correct expression for fakes) presents event obvious fakes.

Tzatziki

SPIE get closer to the Village People

For 2010, the SPIE conference on Media Watermaking, Security and Forensics leaves San-Jose to meet San-Francisco (more exactly its International Airport).

On good trafic conditions, the Airport is 30mm far for downtown by car, and the same by the subway, which means possibly interesting after-sessions.

Deadline for extended abstract and summary: 28 June 2010.

More information Here.

Stormy SPIE

From Mr Tsukemono,

Mr. Tsukemono was sad to see only 4 papers related to Steganography and Steganalysis on the whole conference. The general trend of the decreasing number of papers continues, as WIFS enjoyed only one such paper. But the good news is that the quality of papers was good. And quality is preferred over quantity. 
Mr. Tsukemono has enjoyed following two papers:
  - Application of Viterbi algorithm to asymptotically reach rate distortion bound due to T. Filler, J. Judas and J. Fridrich.  
 - YASS algorithm is finally broken by blind steganalysis, though 1200 features makes Mr. Tsukemono rather bitter.
 Remark: The session was dominated by Binghamton University, from which 3 out of 4 papers came. What are the other groups doing? Are they saving papers for IHW, ACM, WIFS, IWDW, ICIP, ICASP or what else? We should hope.  By considering number of papers and sessions, forget steganography and steganalysis, forensics is the hype now. Forensics was subject of  5 sessions. We could see great papers coming from Dartmouth, Dresden, Binghamton, Purdue, and others. It was not coincidence that 3 papers dealt with the same topic, i.e. how to efficiently search and match fingerprint in large database. Each paper approached the problem from completely different direction. 
Another important point: we could finally see an attempt to plant a new camera fingerprint to the image (and method to detect this forgery).  The watermarking is getting popular as well. The number of accepted papers was so large that the papers had to be presented in parallel sessions. Good for watermarking, bad for conference attendees.  Although tutorial talks this year lacked stunning pictures from deep sea or from deep inside of the human body, they made Mr. Tsukemono a goose flesh. He realized that his new shiny iPhone is spying on him...