Digital multimedia content, can be created, edited, distributed, shared, and stored with convenience at a very low cost over the mobile and ad hoc nature of today's various networks. As a result, multimedia security and digital authentication, transmission and detection of sensitive information via communication systems have become a very important research subject recently. Encryption and data hiding are two most popular areas in multimedia security research. This talk will focus on data hiding techniques, especially, steganography techniques.

Steganography is the hiding of a message within another message so that the presence of the hidden message is indiscernible. Practically, it is the art of secret communication. Digital data can be hidden in pictures, videos, music, text, binary files, or source code. The key concept behind steganography is that the message to be transmitted is not visible to the informal eye or ears. In fact, people who are not intended to be the recipients of the message should not even suspect that a hidden message exists. Recently, steganography has received enormous attention in industry and in academia because it has been reported that terrorists has been using information hiding to disguise their communications.

One the hand, the purpose of steganalysis is to discover the presence of hidden messages in digital media. Steganography and steganalysis have not been completely examined in detail by the scientific community outside the military. It is a relatively new and fast growing field. This area now has become a multimillion-dollar research market and closely related to the security of every nation. This talk will also explore this research area.