Year in Review: 2005

I hope that this email finds you all well. I write to update you on the happenings of the Image Science Group. At various times this year, the group consisted of Kimo Johnson, Siwei Lyu, Weihong Wang and Jeff Woodward.

Siwei Lyu defended his Ph.D. dissertation on a general-purpose statistical model for natural images with applications to digital image forensics. Two applications in digital image forensics include stenganalysis and differentiating between photographic and computer generated images:

And Siwei's dissertation, Natural Image Statistics for Digital Image Forensics is available on-line.

While it was very difficult to say goodbye to Siwei, I am thrilled to report that he is currently a postdoc at NYU working with Eero Simoncelli in the Center for Neural Science and Department of Mathematics. Siwei continues to work in the general area of natural image statistics as well as exploring new areas in, among others, computational neuroscience. We look forward to seeing great things from Siwei over the years.

Kimo Johnson has also been working in the area of digital image forensics and has been developing some very nice and powerful techniques for detecting doctored photos. The first paper describes a technique for detecting inconsistencies in lighting that might emerge when creating a digital composite:

Kimo is currently working on several other light/optics based techniques, that I am hopeful will eventually lead to techniques for camera ballistics -- that of identifying a specific or type of camera from an image.

Weihong Wang joined the group this year and has begun an ambitious project of expanding our forensic work to digital video. We are currently writing up our first set of results and have several promising ideas that we are developing. I expect this to be an important and exciting new research direction.

Jeff Woodward joined the group the year as a part-time programmer. Jeff is porting all of our image forensic matlab code into Java (the code will be incorporated as plugins into the open source ImageJ). This project is part of grant from the FBI, and these tools will eventually be incorporated into the FBI digital forensic lab. Along the way, Jeff is helping us to refine and rethink all of our ideas, leading to many important computational and algorithmic improvements.

As for me, most significantly, I have spent the Spring and Fall term in Santa Cruz, CA. During both terms I worked with the Adobe Photoshop team (San Jose, CA) exploring possible collaborative work in digital forensics and in other areas of general scientific computing. While it is, at times, difficult to be away from Dartmouth, this has been a wonderful opportunity for me to have time to think, read, write and explore new research directions.

Life on the west coast is, of course, a mixture of work and play. I have spent a little bit of time photographing the beautiful landscape, particularly along the pacific coast. Below is a thumbnail of a 17,251 x 2,496 pixel composite seamed together from five individual images.

In alumni news, David Martin is working as a system engineer at Wily Technologies near San Francisco. Joe Pechter started Dental School at Tufts and Will Pechter is finishing his masters' program at Florida Atlantic University. Senthil Periaswamy has been doing some exciting work at Siemens in medical imaging and is now the proud father of his second child, Smrithi. Alin Popescu has taken a job at Renesys here in Hanover working in the area of network systems and security. Jethro Rothe-Kushel is in Los Angeles producing movies (check out some of his cool work at www.jethrofilms.com). Kate Sherwin is back on the east coast (thankfully in one piece) after many years of competitive bicycle racing, working in the tech industry. And Hai Sun is finishing up the M.D. portion of his M.D./Ph.D.

I hope that this email finds you all well and happy. Please stay in touch and let me know how things are.