On the intertwining of information hiding and multimedia security: a personal perspective

Over the past decade or so, the tremendous growth and proliferation of multimedia content has led to the important need to protect and verify the content integrity, particularly if the data are to be used for law enforcement, media, legal and financial applications. This has resulted in the research and applications of information hiding, and multimedia security and forensics becoming more and more integrated and intertwined and as clearly demonstrated, amongst other common activities, with the merging of the two prestigious and popular conferences of IH and ACM MMSec into ACM IHMMSEC'2013. In this keynote presentation, I will present a personal perspective on some of the various changes, challenges, threats and opportunities in the areas of watermarking, steganography/steganalysis, and multimedia security and forensics that I have faced and experienced since I first stumbled upon digital watermarking and steganography some 16 years ago which I am still very much actively involved today. The talk with provide a chronological overview of some key milestones related to watermarking, information hiding and digital forensics, as well as including some personal events from setting up and managing a University spinout, to technology transfer and product commercialization.