Dr. Alex C. Kot Professor, IEEE Fellow of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

With the fast proliferation of digital cameras and other image acquisition devices due to the advancement in digital photography technology, photos from the public may have good news values for making journalist reports. However, one big challenge is how to authenticate the photo contents from the public, which may come from unreliable sources. A large variety of forensics works have been proposed to address various forensic challenges based on different types of tell-tale signs. This talk introduces several techniques for: (1) Accurate detection of image demosaicing regularity as a general type of image forensics features. (2) Identification of various common image source models including digital still cameras, RAW conversion tools and the low-end mobile cameras; (3) Universal detection of a wide range of common image tampering. (4) Tampering detection for blur images. (5) EXIF file tampering or content manipulations, (6) Tempering detection with blur images, and (7) Prevention of the image recapturing threat in spoofing, especially in face spoofing. These techniques help expose common image forgeries, especially those easy-to-make forgeries, which can be hardly seen directly by human eyes. The common theme behind these forensics techniques is through statistical detection of some intrinsic image regularity or tampering anomalies.

Biography:

Prof. Alex C. Kot has been with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore since 1991. He headed the Division of Information Engineering at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering for eight years and served as Associate Chair/Research and Vice Dean Research for the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and was the Associate Dean for College of Engineering. He is currently Professor and Director of the Rapid-Rich Object SEarch (ROSE) Laband Director of NTU-PKU Joint Research Institute. He has published extensively in the areas of signal processing for communication, biometrics, data-hiding, image forensics, information security and object recognition and retrieval.

Dr. Kot served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part I as well as Part II. He also served as Guest Editor for the Special Issues for the IEEE Transactions on CSVT and EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. He is currently Associate Editor for the EURASIP Journal on Advanced in Signal Processing.

Dr. Kot has served the IEEE SP Society in various capacities such as the General Co-chair for the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) and Chair of the worldwide SPS Chapter Chairs and the Distinguished Lecturer program. He was a member in the IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee and served as the Vice-President for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He received the Best Teacher of the Year Award and was a coauthor for several Best Paper Awards including ICPR, IEEE WIFS, ICEC, and IWDW. He was an IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow of Academy of Engineering, Singapore.