Year in Review: 2006

I hope that this email finds you all well. I write to update you on the happenings of the Image Science Group. The group currently consists of Kimo Johnson, Weihong Wang, Peter Wayner and Jeff Woodward.

The lab continues to be incredibly productive and I am thrilled with both the intellectual content of our research in digital forensics, and in the impact it seems to be making in many corners of our society. The lab's success is due to all of the current and former lab members who worked so hard -- to all of you, I am extremely thankful.

Kimo Johnson has been developing some exciting and powerful new forensic tools with an emphasis on lighting and optics. Here is a link to some very nice work that exploits optical aberrations to detect tampering:

Kimo also worked through some complicated projective geometry and showed how some recent results from the computer vision community could be used in a forensic setting:

Kimo defended his Ph.D. proposal earlier this year, and while I am eager to keep Kimo in the lab for as long as possible, I expect that he will defend his Ph.D. dissertation some time in 2007.

Weihong Wang has been doing some excellent work in digital video forensics. While the field of image forensics is slowly growing, the field of video forensics is currently non-existent, except for Weihong's first publication that describes how to detect a doubly-compressed video stream (this work expands on Alin Popescu's original work on detecting double image compression). Here is a link to the paper:

Weihong's early work has already garnered the attention of the popular press:

We are currently working on several other ideas and I expect Weihong to defend his Ph.D. proposal sometime in 2007.

Both Peter Wayner and Jeff Woodward have been working with us to help port all of our forensics work into a stand-alone software that can be used by a forensic examiner. Thanks to their efforts, we are making significant progress and hope to have a beta-version to law enforcement by the summer of 2007.

As for me, most significantly, I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in return given a year of sabbatical by Dartmouth. I am spending most of my time in Santa Cruz, CA where I continue to collaborate with industry partners, and spend long days thinking, reading and writing. I was also promoted to Full Professor. As always, you can find on my web page copies of our papers and popular press accounts of our work.

In alumni news,

• Siwei Lyu has been a postdoc at NYU for the past few years where he has continued to do exciting research in the area of natural image statistics.
• Dave Martin is living in Seattle, WA with his wife, and is working at Wily Technologies where his work has him specializing in Java performance for large web applications.
• Senthil Periaswamy became a father for the second time, and is working at Siemens in Philadelphia, PA doing some excellent work in various areas of medical imaging.
• Alin Popescu is working at Renesys Inc. here in Hanover, NH and has been enjoying the algorithmic and systems-oriented challenges of the job.
• Jethro Rothe-Kushel has been living in Los Angeles, CA and working in various corners of the movie industry. Check out his website to see some of his work.
• Kate Sherwin has moved to Austin, TX. Having spent the past few years racing her bicycle professionally, Kate will be taking a job working in the field of computational finance.
• Hai Sun has finished his M.D. and is currently interviewing for residency positions.

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