Wu, Liu Co-Authors of Award-Winning Paper on Multimedia Forensics

A paper co-authored by University of Maryland researchers Jane Wang, Min Wu (ECE/UMIACS), Wade Trappe, and K.J. Ray Liu (ECE/ISR) has been awarded the European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing (EURASIP) Journal on Applied Signal Processing Best Paper Award for 2004. The paper was titled “Group-Oriented Fingerprinting for Multimedia Forensics.”

The University of Maryland research team has pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to conducting research on digital fingerprinting for multimedia content protection. Digital fingerprinting is an emerging technology that protects multimedia from unauthorized redistribution by embedding a unique ID into each user's copy, which can be extracted to help identify culprits when an unauthorized leak is found. The team’s research addresses a number of issues, including theory, design, attacks, and counter-attacks for fingerprinting multimedia and tracing unauthorized usage. The award-winning paper proposed a novel framework of group-oriented fingerprinting that exploits the behavior patterns of adversaries and provides superior traitor tracing capability over the prior art.

The competition among about a dozen nominated papers was extremely strong, including work from several top research groups from universities across US and Europe. The winning paper was selected based on originality, technical quality, and presentation. The award includes a certificate and check for the authors, which will be presented at the EURASIP 2005 Conference this coming September in Antalya, Turkey.

Wu was most recently honored with a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), while Liu received the 2005 Poole and Kent Senior Faculty Teaching Award and also won Maryland’s Invention of the Year award in the Information Science category in May. As former members of Liu's research group, Wang, a former post-doc researcher, now serves on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, while Trappe, an alumnus, is now an assistant professor with the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers University.

Published July 13, 2005