IH&MMSEC

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security, Salzburg, Austria, June 11-13, 2014.

For over a decade, two workshops have been shaping the landscape of research in multimedia security. On the one hand, Information Hiding (aka. IH) was created in 1996 and focused on digital watermarking, steganography and steganalysis, anonymity and privacy, hard to intercept communications and covert/subliminal channels. On the other hand, the ACMWorkshop on Multimedia and Security (aka. ACM MM&Sec) was initiated in 1998 and focused on data hiding, robust/perceptual hashing, biometrics, video surveillance and multimedia forensics. Key seminal works have been published in these two workshops and papers accepted for publication there attracted over 9,000 citations in total. Year after year, the two communities grew closer and the overlap between their respective scopes got bigger. As a result, after 14 successful editions each, IH and ACM MMSec decided to merge into a single event in an attempt to establish synergies between the two communities while, at the same time, building upon the reputation obtained over the years.

After the successful 1st edition being held Montpellier, France, June 17-19, 2013, the 2nd ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security is being held here in Salzburg, Austria, June 11-13, 2014. We hope that this second edition of the workshop, resulting from merging two long standing sustainable events, successfully continues to be an attractive research forum that facilitates cross-fertilization of ideas among key stakeholders from academia, industry, practitioners and government agencies around the globe.

The call for papers attracted 64 submissions from Asia, South America, the United States, and Europe. The program committee accepted 24 papers (which corresponds to an acceptance rate of 37.5%) that cover a variety of interesting topics.

Throughout the review process, we obtained 190 reviews in total which equals 3 reviews per paper on average. Reviews either came from members of the PC, or from one of 33 external reviewers. In case of conflicting reviews, the reviewers were encouraged to engage in discussion, adjust their scores, and reach a consensus decision. During two PC chair meetings, these discussions as well as the initial reviews served as the basis for final acceptance or rejection. 11 full and 13 short papers, distributed over 1 main track and 4 special sessions, were eventually selected for presentation at the conference.

The program includes two invited talks (on JPEG security standardization and the EU FP7 FastPass project), four special sessions (Security and Privacy Technologies for Intelligent Energy Networks, Security and Robustness in Biometrics, Forensic and Biometric Challenges in Information Hiding and Media Security, and HEVC, H.264, and JPEG Security), and two industrial presentations by local Salzburg media security companies (Authentic Vision and Denuvo).