Multimedia, Security and Forensics (MSF) Group

Department of Computing, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK

Professor Anthony T.S. Ho joined the University of Surrey, UK in 2006. He is Chair Professor of Multimedia Security leading the MSF Research Group and is currently Head of Department of Computing since 2010. Tony obtained his PhD in Digital Image Processing from King’s College London in 1983. After graduation, he worked in industry for 11 years in the UK and Canada. From 1994 to 2005, he was a Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

Tony has published around 140 articles in international journals and conference proceedings and 8 patents. He was the recipient of the prestigious IET Innovation in Engineering Award for his work on digital watermarking in 2006. He recently received a best paper award from IEVC 2012. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA) published by Elsevier and an Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters. He was invited keynote speaker at ACM IH&MMSec 2013 and IEEE ICAIT 2010.

Tony has been serving on three IEEE technical committees. He was General/Program (Co-)Chair of a number of international conferences such as IEEE MLSP 2013, IEEE MMSS 2011, IWDW 2009 and IWDW 2008. He is a Fellow of IET, a Fellow of IoP and a Fellow of BCS.

The Multimedia, Security and Forensics (MSF) Group focuses on the interplay among multimedia, security and forensics technologies, which cover research on digital watermarking and authentication, data hiding, steganography and steganalysis, multimedia content protection, biometrics, usable security involving multimedia human-computer interface, and their applications for image, video, audio and binary content. Recent work on image forensics has also attracted much attention from this group including camera identification, anomaly detection, forgery and tamper detection. Some new research directions recently developed in the group include usable security involving multimedia human-computer interface and biometrics. Since 2011 the group has also started working on some areas in cyber security and digital forensics which do not involve multimedia data, e.g. infrastructure protection, security of e-banking systems, computer forensics and mobile device forensics. The group is also performing research on media computing, machine learning, visual quality assessment, error-control coding and reconfigurable multimedia coding, which play an important role of supporting research on multimedia security and forensics.

Potential applications for digital watermarking and forensics include the usage in the court of law for identifying the origin of unlawful multimedia content, to helping witnesses to identify where the blame lie, as well as for use in the proof of ownership and subsequently copyright infringement cases.

The MSF group currently has 17 active members consisting of 6 academics and 11 PhD students. There are also several PhD students co-supervised by academics of MSF group. Some of the group's research activities have attracted international recognition by winning the prestigious IET innovation in Engineering Award in 2006 for its work on research and commercialization of digital watermarking software. The group also hosted the 8th International Workshop on Digital Watermarking (IWDW 2009) at the University of Surrey in 2009.

a.ho@surrey.ac.uk