Pierre Moulin, University of Illinois
This tutorial reviews the theory and design of codes for hiding or embedding information in signals such as images, video, audio, graphics, and text. Such codes have also been called watermarking codes; they can be used in a variety of applications, including copyright protection for digital media, content authentication, media forensics, data binding, and covert communications. Some of these applications imply the presence of an adversary attempting to disrupt the transmission of information to the receiver; other applications involve a noisy, generally unknown, communication channel.
Our focus is on the mathematical models, fundamental principles, and code design techniques that are applicable to data hiding. The approach draws from basic concepts in information theory, coding theory, game theory and signal processing, and is illustrated with applications to the problem of hiding data in images.
Pierre Moulin received his doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1990, after which he joined at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey, as a Research Scientist. In 1996, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor at the Beckman Institute and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and affiliate professor in the Department of Statistics.
His fields of professional interest include image and video processing, compression, statistical signal processing and modeling, media security, decision theory, and information theory.
Dr. Moulin serves or has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He is co-founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. He has served IEEE in various other capacities and is currently a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors.
He received a 1997 Career award from the National Science Foundation and an IEEE Signal Processing Society 1997 Senior Best Paper award. He is also co-author (with Juan Liu) of a paper that received an IEEE Signal Processing Society 2002 Young Author Best Paper award. He was 2003 Beckman Associate of UIUC's Center for Advanced Study. He is an IEEE Fellow, recipient of UIUC's 2005 Sony Faculty award, and plenary speaker for ICASSP 2006.