Events Calendar

Blind Multimedia Processing

Speaker: Sen-ching Samson Cheung,Ph.D. , MIA Laboratory, University of Kentucky

Talk Title: Blind Multimedia Processing

Abstract: The right to privacy has long been regarded as one of the basic universal human rights. The combination of ubiquitous sensors, wireless connectivity, and powerful recognition algorithms makes it easier than ever to monitor every aspect of our daily lives. From the use of sophisticated video surveillance systems to the theft of biometric signals, people are increasingly wary about the privacy of their multimedia data. To mitigate public concern over privacy violation, it is imperative to make privacy protection a priority in developing the next-generation multimedia processing algorithms. Due to the high dimensionality, high data-rates and stringent real-time requirements of multimedia systems, developing provably-secure privacy protection schemes for multimedia often leads to a blowup in complexity and remains impractical for most applications. In this talk, I will discuss a number of active projects in my group that aim at alleviating such an efficiency barrier. I will present the anonymous biometric access control system that can validate a biometric signal without knowing the identity of the owner. Anonymity is guaranteed by performing the matching on biometric signals that are encrypted with a homomorphic public-key cryptosystem. To reduce complexity of the encrypted-domain processing, we propose a k-anonymous quantization scheme that can optimally tradeoff efficiency with privacy. To realize the holy grail of privacy-protected signal processing at the pixel level, I will also discuss our recent work on secure cloud-based image processing with secret shares. The focus of this work is on the use of information-theoretic, rather than computationally, secure protocols for image processing. Image data and parameters are decomposed into secret shares and distributed in the cloud for processing. Giving a non-colluding distributed computing environment, such an approach is significantly faster and requires less bandwidth than other computationally-secure multiparty computation. I will use the example of a wavelet image denoising to illustrate our core framework of image processing with secret shares.


Biography: Sen-ching (Samson) Cheung is an associate professor from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Kentucky (UKY). He also has a joint appointment with the UKY Center of Visualization and Virtual Environments. Before joining UKY in 2004, he was a computer scientist in the Scientific Data Mining group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Samson got his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2002. His work spans a number of different areas in multimedia including video copy detection, data mining, video surveillance, privacy protection, encrypted-domain signal processing, and computational multimedia for therapy. He is an associated editor of IEEE Transactions of Multimedia, Signal Processing: Image Communications, Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, and EURASIP Journal on Information Security. He is a senior member of IEEE.

Host: Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia Veal