MSyNC Laboratory at Stevens sharpens the cutting edge of multimedia security and wireless networking

The department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Stevens Institute of Technology is now home to an exciting new wireless and digital tech research center. Known by the acronym MSyNC, the venture is formally titled the Multimedia Systems, Networking and Communications Lab. (The official website URL is www.ece.stevens-tech.edu/~msync.)

Two assistant professors at ECE, K.P. Subbalakshmi and R. Chandramouli, founded the MSyNC Lab in 2000. Three doctoral candidates, two master's candidates, and four undergraduate students join them in their research. A variety of corporate sponsors and academic partners enable the work to go forward, including SUN Microsystems, Elanix, Inc., the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas at Dallas.

The National Science Foundation, the New Jersey Center for Wireless Technology and the Stevens Technogenesis Fund also provide support.

Multimedia Security

Among the several R&D projects now underway at MSyNC, there is one of special pertinence to security in the Internet Age: digital watermarking for multimedia security - concerned with perfecting high-tech equivalents to disappearing ink and encryption devices of old. The basic premise of the research is that any digital media can be embedded within any other digital media. In an age dependent on high-speed transfer of data, with resultant fears for the secure transmission of sensitive information, this digital means of hiding data within data has become a high-priority area for research. As with so much current technology, the field is so new, it goes by a name of fairly recent coinage: "Steganography."

Outlining the principles involved in steganography, Chandramouli explains:

"Let us say a digital image is 256 x 256 pixels. The pixels, in a gray scale image, will range from white to black. The LSBs, or 'least significant bits' of information, are one area where you can hide other digital data, without degrading the host image. The amount of information you can hide in an image will depend on the image itself and the hiding technique. And the embedded information can be in any digital format: video, audio, still images, or documents. A promising application of this technique is digital content protection using watermarking."

Chandramouli points out that "steganalysis," which he defines comically as "hacking raised to the level of science," is the science of attacking the hidden information. The researchers at MSyNC seek new ways to make both hidden data and decoding more baffling to cyberspies and the average college-age hacker. Their collective efforts show early signs of success.

Other areas of application include digital fingerprinting, to identify the source of illegally copied material; authentication, to detect whether an image or video has been altered; and "intelligent media," which would allow a serious union of print and Internet media and enable self-protection against malicious attacks.

Multimedia Networking

The MSyNC Lab is also pursuing R&D efforts in the areas of multimedia networking, especially wireless heterogeneous networks. The mobile wireless segments of these networks introduce disturbances in the transmitted data that are quite different in characteristics from their wired counterparts. Making the multimedia data resilient to such "noise" is a challenging task. The lab conducts research on both the theoretical and practical aspects of these issues.

Joint source/channel coding is one of the ideas that has lately gained currency for achieving error-resilience. Source coding is the art or science of representing multimedia data, like video or image, with as few bits as possible. Channel codes, on the other hand, are aimed at protecting the information in the source from external errors. The lab has developed algorithms that use both wireless channel information and the information about the source greatly to improve the error resilience of the multimedia data. These methods are currently being extended to state-of-the-art digital compression standards like JPEG 2000 and MPEG 4.

Ongoing research in the MSyNC lab includes new error-resilience strategies, such as multiple description coding. In congested networks, some of the information packets can be lost in transit. The idea behind multiple description coding is to create several "descriptions" of the data that can be sent over different routes in the wireless network, such that the reception of a certain number of these descriptions guarantees an acceptable quality, and the quality improves if more descriptions are received. This idea is currently being investigated for wireless video transmission in the lab.

With all this research, the lab also emphasizes the training and teaching aspects.

"The educational objective of the lab is to train graduate and undergraduate students in multimedia and wireless information technologies," the lab's directors say. "Courses offered by us emphasize a good mix of theory and hands-on experience. Course projects give students an opportunity to work in teams and design technologies from theory to their implementation."

Chandramouli and Subbalakshmi have presented many papers on topics related to multimedia and wireless communications. Chandramouli will deliver a major address in August before a gathering of the Wall Street Technology Association in New York. The topic of his talk will be Wireless Networking for Financial Services: State of the Art and Future Challenges.

Subbalakshmi recently organized and chaired a special session on "Current Trends in Multimedia Communications and Computing" at the IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing. She has also contributed an invited chapter titled "Image Compression" to the forthcoming book, A Handbook on Lossless Image Compression, to be published by Academic Press.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.  

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