National Symposium and Winter School on Multimedia Signal Processing and Applications

Chengdu, China, January 19-30, 2015

We are pleased to announce the 1st edition of the national symposium and winter School on Multimedia Signal Processing and Applications to be held from 19-30 January 2015 at Chengdu, China.

Pressed by the incredible technological and societal changes of the last decade, multimedia is gradually emerging as the basis of next generation information and communication technologies. It is a very active field, where different disciplines intersect creating great opportunities for new and stimulating research directions. Multimedia signal processing has been widely encountered in our daily life. It deals with algorithms for the processing of signals, which are used by humans for communication with other people or machines or dealing with the world around.
The first national symposium and winter school on Multimedia Signal Processing and Applications will be held to provide a forum for researchers and technologists to present new ideas and contributions in the form of technical papers in the field of multimedia signal processing. This year the symposium will be focused on multimedia forensics and biometrics security. On the other hand, the winter school aims at offering participants from all over the world - both academicians and researchers - training on the latest technological developments in the area of multimedia signal processing (media analysis, media annotation, media rights management) and of emerging multimedia applications (in the forensics, security, biometrics, media applications, audiovisual archives, digital preservation).
The school will combine delivering in-depth lectures with giving to its participants the possibility for gaining hands-on experience on the use of new multimedia processing techniques (e.g. media fragment annotation and re-use technologies), and on the effectiveness, privacy etc. The latest R&D in national and international funded projects and latest insights from experts in the industry domains which stand to benefit from these new technologies will help attendees to appreciate the state of the art and future chances for industry adoption. The school will also support the close interaction between all participants; among other possibilities, all school's attendees will have the chance to bring a poster describing their current research work and present it in the winter school for generating collaboration with the other attendees and researchers.


Objectives & Benefits:
• Meet international research colleagues also doing research in areas relevant to multimedia processing and applications
• Share your research interests, achievements and challenges within the school
• Get to interact with others who might share the same problems and have advice for your research
• Connect with research and industry peers in a small and informal school setting, including national and international project coordinators and multimedia experts
• Socialize and have fun
Scope of the Symposium
The symposium will address all aspects of architecture and design of multimedia signal processing systems. Emphasis is on current and future challenges in research and development in both academia and industry. The symposium will include the following topics, but not limited to:
• Optimization of Signal Processing Algorithms and Architectures:
o Dataflow-based design and implementation
o Optimization of signal processing algorithms
o Compilers and tools for signal processing system design
o Algorithm transformation and algorithm-to-architecture mapping

• Software-based Design & Implementation of Signal Processing Systems:
o Embedded signal processing in cyber-physical systems
o Programmable digital signal processor architecture and systems
o Application specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) architecture and systems
o SIMD, VLIW, and multi-core CPU architecture and systems
o Graphic processing unit (GPU) based massively parallel implementation

• VLSI Based Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems:
o Low-power signal processing circuits and applications
o High performance VLSI systems
o FPGA and reconfigurable architecture based systems
o System-on-chip and network-on-chip

• Signal Processing Application Systems:
o Audio, speech and language processing
o Multimedia forensics (audio, image, video)
o Biomedical signal processing and bioinformatics
o Image, video and multimedia signal processing
o Information forensics, security and cryptography
o Machine learning for signal processing
o Sensing and sensor signal processing
o Wireless communications and networking

Winter School Tracks and Outline:

The winter school will have the following two tracks this year. The first session of the school will cover lectures on computer and multimedia forensics and the last session will comprise topics on biometrics and security.

1. Computer and Multimedia Forensics:
This track will present an introduction and overview on computer forensics, as well as new developments in multimedia forensics. 
First, the standard methods and tools of computer forensics are discussed in detail. These include: incidence response, data collection, forensic duplication, evidence handling, data analysis techniques, forensic tools, analyzing Windows systems, reporting and presentation of results, and legal issues. 
Then, the new and emerging topic of multimedia forensics is introduced with treatment of its subareas: forensics for images, audio, video, cameras, scanners and printers, cell phones, and pen digitizers. Here, the focus is on signal and image processing and sensometrics for sensor identification and tamper detection. 
For example, for identifying digital cameras, any photographic image can be subjected to analysis. General fundamentals will be introduced and specific approaches for selected media examples of image, audio, video, cell phone data and digital handwritten documents will be discussed to show the recent advances and still open problems.

Learning Outcomes:

This track will enable participants to:

• Obtain an overview on modern computer forensics, forensic tools and methods, and legal issues
• Obtain basic insights into media forensics and the related security information which can be extracted from multimedia
• Summarize the main state-of-the-art techniques for the digital image-, audio-, video-, and handwriting-processing domains
• Become familiar with techniques by which manipulations can be identified on images
• Describe the general approaches of sensometrics for device identification
• Assess today's general limits of the techniques in respect to the achieved security level and confidence
• Develop a perspective on the future research directions

2. Biometrics Security & Privacy:

This module’s objective is to familiarize attendees with the recent developments, encompassing new discoveries in the areas of information representation, image processing, database system design, surface modeling and visualization. Traditional and emerging technologies for fingerprint matching, face reconstruction, emotion animation, iris synthesis, voice recognition, thermogram-based biometrics, and fusion methods will be studied in this track. Biometric Technologies laboratory equipment and software will be used to illustrate some of the practical applications. Impact of these developments on the society, privacy and ethics will also be considered.

Learning Outcomes:

The objective of this track is to study advanced algorithms in the area of applied sciences, computer graphics and biometric technologies. The module introduces theoretical bases for studying biometrics, with particular focus on algorithmic foundations, computer graphics techniques, topological properties of the biometric data, information representation, data storage and data search, comparison and matching.
The methods and techniques learned in the module will be illustrated on the examples of solving verification, identification, and synthesis problems for a variety of biometrics. Biometrics such as fingerprint, face, eye, ear, palm, gait, voice, signature and others will be discussed.
Particular interest will be on hardware devices and their rapid development, as well as the variety of specific software developed for particular agencies (government, academia, banks, individuals etc.). Impact of these developments on the society, privacy and ethics will also be considered.

Contact and Submission: organizer@wspa.swu.edu.cn