Image and Video Processing for Security Applications

For a number of years Prof. Tsaftaris has worked on watermarking for the copyright protection of MPEG-2 media. Specifically the project was funded from the European Union and was largely completed while Prof. Tsaftaris was with the Informatics and Telematics Institute. The result was a system for real-time embedding and detection of watermarks inserted in the I-frames of MPEG-2 system streams. The watermarks were perceptually embedded in the quantized domain while detection was performed in the DCT domain. Prof. Tsaftaris also consulted in the development of a secure real-time DVD player, where the watermark was detected real-time in DVD media.

Recently, in collaboration with Ehsan Maani and Prof. Katsaggelos, we have been looking into using steganography for the extraction of unique signatures from video files for the successful copyright control of media (also known as fingerprinting). The work is geared towards providing a framework for the control of distribution of illegal media in user generated media repositories (ie., YouTube, metacafe, veoh, etc).

Members of IVPL have also been working in areas related to National and Homeland Security. Specifically we have publications in the areas of:

• Video Surveillance
• Video Analytics
• Video Mining