Princeton-Rutgers Seminar Series in Communications and Information Theory


Title: Provably Good Multimedia Content Authentication Systems
(or How to Make a Photograph Trustworthy)

Speaker: Gregory W. Wornell, MIT

Date: April 8, 2004, 4:00 - 5:00pm

Location: DIMACS Center, CoRE Bldg, Room 431, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ


Abstract:

In many multimedia applications, there is a need to authenticate a source that has been subjected to benign degradations in addition to potential tampering attacks. We develop a meaningful notion of authentication for such problems, and develop the associated information-theoretic performance limits. In particular, we develop the inherent tradeoff between encoding and reconstruction distortions under a security guarantee, and illustrate the results through some basic examples. We interpret the resulting codes as natural generalizations of digital signatures, and also discuss both similarities and differences to the digital watermarking problem. As a problem with facets in information theory, communication theory, signal processing, and computer science, this work suggests interesting research opportunities in each of these communities and between them, as we'll discuss.

Based on joint work with Emin Martinian, and Brian Chen.