The dynamics of complex systems. Studies and applications in computer science and biology

Our research has focused on the study of complex dynamics and on their use in both information security and bioinformatics. Our first work has been on chaotic discrete dynamical systems, and links have been established between these dynamics on the one hand, and either random or complex behaviors. Applications on information security are on the pseudorandom numbers generation, hash functions, informationhiding, and on security aspects on wireless sensor networks. On the bioinformatics level, we have applied our studies of complex systems to theevolution of genomes and to protein folding

Image and Video Forensics

Nowadays, images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in everyday life, and their pervasiveness has led the image forensics community to question their reliability, integrity, confidentiality, and security. Multimedia contents are generated in many different ways through the use of consumer electronics and high-quality digital imaging devices, such as smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, and wearable and IoT devices. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of digital images on digital social platforms, determining a great amount of exchange data. Moreover, the pervasiveness of powerful image editing tools has allowed the manipulation of digital images for malicious or criminal ends, up to the creation of synthesized images and videos with the use of deep learning techniques. In response to these threats, the multimedia forensics community has produced major research efforts regarding the identification of the source and the detection of manipulation. In all cases (e.g., forensic investigations, fake news debunking, information warfare, and cyberattacks) where images and videos serve as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, authenticity, and integrity of multimedia content can become essential tools. This book aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in image and video forensics to tackle new and serious challenges to ensure media authenticity

Photo response non-uniformity based image forensics in the presence of challenging factors

With the ever-increasing prevalence of digital imaging devices and the rapid development of networks, the sharing of digital images becomes ubiquitous in our daily life. However, the pervasiveness of powerful image-editing tools also makes the digital images an easy target for malicious manipulations. Thus, to prevent people from falling victims to fake information and trace the criminal activities, digital image forensics methods like source camera identification, source oriented image clustering and image forgery detections have been developed. Photo response non-uniformity (PRNU), which is an intrinsic sensor noise arises due to the pixels non-uniform response to the incident, has been used as a powerful tool for image device fingerprinting. The forensic community has developed a vast number of PRNU-based methods in different fields of digital image forensics. However, with the technology advancement in digital photography, the emergence of photo-sharing social networking sites, as well as the anti-forensics attacks targeting the PRNU, it brings new challenges to PRNU-based image forensics. For example, the performance of the existing forensic methods may deteriorate due to different camera exposure parameter settings and the efficacy of the PRNU-based methods can be directly challenged by image editing tools from social network sites or anti-forensics attacks. The objective of this thesis is to investigate and design effective methods to mitigate some of these challenges on PRNU-based image forensics. We found that the camera exposure parameter settings, especially the camera sensitivity, which is commonly known by the name of the ISO speed, can influence the PRNU-based image forgery detection. Hence, we first construct the Warwick Image Forensics Dataset, which contains images taken with diverse exposure parameter settings to facilitate further studies. To address the impact from ISO speed on PRNU-based image forgery detection, an ISO speed-specific correlation prediction process is proposed with a content-based ISO speed inference method to facilitate the process even if the ISO speed information is not available. We also propose a three-step framework to allow the PRNUbased source oriented clustering methods to perform successfully on Instagram images, despite some built-in image filters from Instagram may significantly distort PRNU. Additionally, for the binary classification of detecting whether an image's PRNU is attacked or not, we propose a generative adversarial network-based training strategy for a neural network-based classifier, which makes the classifier generalize better for images subject to unprecedented attacks. The proposed methods are evaluated on public benchmarking datasets and our Warwick Image Forensics Dataset, which is released to the public as well. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the methods proposed in this thesis