Year in Review: 2004

I hope that this mail finds you all well. In what is becoming a yearly tradition, I write to update you on the happenings of the Image Science Group. At various times this year, the group consisted of Lorie Loeb (resident artist/animator/graphics guru), four Ph.D. students, Kimo Johnson, Siwei Lyu, Alin Popescu, and Hai Sun, and two undergraduates, Joe and Will Pechter.

For their senior theses, Joe and Will, working primarily with Lorie, did some outstanding work on text-to-animation and speech-to-animation. Their work earned them high-honors, second place at the Reid Science Competition, and First Prize (team innovation category) in the John G. Kemeny Computing Competition, and probably a few others that I am forgetting.

Hai Sun succesfully (and brilliantly) defended his Ph.D Thesis on image-guided neurosurgery. He is currently in the M.D. program here at Dartmouth, finishing up the M.D./Ph.D. program. Just one of several papers that Hai wrote over this past year is:

Alin Popescu recently defended his Ph.D. Thesis, entitled "Statistical Tools for Digital Image Forensics". This work marks the first substantive body of work on non-watermark based techniques for detecting traces of tampering in digital images. This work was recently listed in the New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas as one of the most important scientific/technological advances of the year:

Two of several papers that Alin wrote are:

Siwei Lyu completed his Ph.D. proposal on a general-purpose statistical model for natural images with applications to digital image forensics. There are at least two very exciting aspects of this work that have emerged in the past year. We have used this work to differentiate between computer generated and photographic images. I have testified in several court cases in regard to the application of this technology to child porn crimes. (If you recall, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in 2002, that computer generated child porn is protected under the first amendmant. As a result, prosecutors are struggling to prosecute this crime, since the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove that the images are real). More technical details can be found here:

And more legal details are can be found here:

Siwei also applied his work to the digital authentication of art. This work appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

The popular press picked up on this work and stories appeared in, among many others, CNN, Boston Globe, Economist, Newsweek, Washington Post, Wired News, and Yahoo News. This is very exciting work, and we plan to pursue several new research areas.

Kimo Johnson completed some nice work on extending our steganalysis work (detecting hidden messages) to audio recordings. These results will be presentend at the upcoming SPIE conference:

In addition, Kimo has been developing some very nice forensic tools to detect traces of digital tampering. This work will nicely complement the work of Alin and Siwei.

The CS Department has completed construction on a new wing that has room for 8 faculty along with student offices and labs. We have moved our offices and lab to this new wing. Our new lab is 900+ sq. ft. (more than twice the size of our old lab). This space does not include separate grad. offices across the hall from the lab. We are currently renovating the space, and, don't worry, I've been talked out of painting the walls black (I'll send photos once the renovations are complete).

And finally, Dartmouth promoted me to Associate Professor with tenure this year. Sadly, they also asked me to be Associate Chair of the department, which means that I am department Chair for 6 months out of the year.

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