Guest Editorial: Multimedia Information Security and Its Applications in Cloud Computing
Guest Editorial: Multimedia Information Security and Its Applications in Cloud Computing
Chuan Qin 0 1 2
Weiming Zhang 0 1 2
Xinpeng Zhang 0 1 2
Chuan Qin 0 1 2
Xinpeng Zhang 0 1 2
0 School of Computer Science, Fudan University , Shanghai 200433 , China
1 School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China , Hefei 230026 , China
2 School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology , Shanghai 200093 , China
Multimedia applications are omnipresent in our daily lives, however, a lot of relevant security issues have emerged as well, such as covert communication using multimedia files, copy-move forgery in digital images and videos, and biometric spoofing. To address these issues, many multimedia information security techniques were proposed by utilizing the methods in areas like machine learning, signal and image processing, and communications. Nevertheless, there still exist some obvious shortcomings in the research methodologies. Current multimedia security studies are often based on the strict conditions that are nearly impossible to meet up in real world. Furthermore, high computational complexity of current methods makes it hard to handle the big data in the environment of cloud computing. All these drawbacks limit the applications of the forensics and other secure techniques in practice, which deserve the in-depth investigations. This special issue aims to bring together the latest research works in the related fields of multimedia information security, which emphasizes on the novel and efficient methodologies that have the potentials to be applied in secure cloud computing. According to the rigorous review procedure consisting of several rounds, each of the 34 manuscripts submitted to the special issue was technically reviewed by at least three anonymous experts. Finally, 18 papers are selected to be included in this special issue, which fall into five main categories: (1) steganography (4 papers), (2) steganalysis (5 papers), (3)
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reversible data hiding (4 papers), (4) Cryptography (2 papers), and (5) other emerging
techniques (3 papers). In the following, we introduce these papers briefly.
1 Steganography
The paper titled BWhich Gray Level Should be Given the Smallest Cost for Adaptive
Steganography?^ (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4565-5), co-authored by Yao Wei,
Weiming Zhang, Weihai Li, Nenghai Yu, and Xi Sun, exploits the relationship between change
costs of steganography and gray level in spatial domain via Gamma encoding. In their
proposed scheme, the gray level that changes most greatly after the Gamma encoding is
assigned with the smallest cost. The cost of each pixel is only linked to its gray level and
independent with its position. Experimental results show that, compared with the prior position
dependent schemes, the proposed scheme has lower time complexity and can be applicable for
the situation with higher speed requirements. In spite of security deficiency, this scheme
reveals an interesting relationship between steganographic costs and gray levels.
BDistortion Function based on Residual Blocks for JPEG Steganography^ (https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11042-017-5053-7) is presented by Qingde Wei, Zhaoxia Yin, Zichi Wang, and
Xinpeng Zhang. The authors propose a distortion function for JPEG steganography based on
residual blocks, in which residual block values (RBV) and quantization steps are involved to
obtain less statistical detectability. Detailedly, the RBVs and the quantization steps are used to
determine the embedding risk caused by DCT block modifications and of selection channel,
respectively. With the help of syndrome trellis coding (STC), the secret data can be embedded
and modifications are restricted in hard-to-detect regions. Experiments show that, the proposed
method performs better than some of state-of-the-art methods for JPEG steganography.
Common steganographic schemes aim to embed the fixed-length secret message into the
cover while minimizing the distortion to the stego. However, in some applications, the sender
requires to embed a variable-length secret payload with expected stego security, which is
called as the problem of secure payload estimation (SPE). In the paper BA Priori Knowledge
Based Secure Payload Estimation^ (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4955-8), Sai Ma,
Xianfeng Zhao, Qingxiao Guan, Zhoujun Xu, and Yi Ma focus on solving the SPE problem
based on two priori knowledge functions, which reflect the relationship between detection
error rate and stego distortion and the relationship between stego distortion and payload rate,
respectively. Although there exists the coding loss in the results, the proposed method can still
be considered as a valuable practical approach for capacity estimation.
In another paper titled BDither Modulation Based Adaptive Steganography Resisting JPEG
Compression and Statistic Detection^ (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4 (...truncated)