Wang, Trappe, Wu and Liu win EURASIP best paper award

A paper co-authored by ISR alums Jane Wang and Wade Trappe, ISR-affiliated Assistant Professor Min Wu (ECE/ UMIACS), and Professor K.J. Ray Liu (ECE/ ISR) has been awarded the European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing's ( EURASIP ) Journal on Applied Signal Processing Best Paper Award for 2004. The paper is 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 in September in Antalya, Turkey.

Wang, a former postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Liu, now serves on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Trappe, whose Ph. D. advisor was Dr. Liu, won ISR's outstanding graduate student award in 2002, is now an assistant professor with the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers University.

Published July 21, 2005