Prof. Sviatoslav Voloshynovskiy

Stochastic Information Processing (SIP) group
Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory
Computer Science Department,
University of Geneva
Battelle campus, Building A
7, route de Drize
CH-1227 Carouge (Geneva), Switzerland
Phone:+41(22)379 0158
fax:+41(22)379 0079
E-mail:svolos@unige.ch
Office:#215

• Associate Professor;
• Head of Stochastic Information Processing Group;
• Coordinator of research and technology transfer to industrial partners.

Current projects

• Reliable and secure forensic authentication based on random projections and distributed coding.
• Secure unclonable identification/authentication codes based on natural randomness.
• IM2(Interactive Multimodal Information Management) projects (The National Center of Competence in Research) in part of Information-theoretic multimodal signal processing (multimodal identification and authentication).

* CRADA: industrial project with Anteleon Imaging (University of Geneva spin-off) (2009-2010).

Former projects

• Professorship project (extended): Documents and brands protection based on digital data-hiding technologies.
• Professorship project: Stochastic detection of hidden data.
• Information-theoretic document authentication and self-recovering based on
  digital data-hiding.
• SIMILAR: Network of Excellence, EU project.
• ECRYPT: Network of Excellence, EU project (WAVILA).
• CRYMEDA-SA CTI project on Crystal marking based encryption and document authentication security architecture for brand protection (2002-2003).
• SNF project Generalized stochastic image modeling for image denoising, restoration and compression (2002-2003).
• CERTIMARK: EU project on Certification of watermarking techniques (2000-2002).
• CRADA: industrial project with Digital Copyright Technologies (DCT) (2000-2001).

Conference/Workshop program/technical committee:

• IWDW2009, International Workshop on Digital Watermarking 2009, Surrey, UK, August 24-26, 2009 (program committee)
• SPIE2009, Electronic Imaging 2009, Multimedia security and watermarking XI, San Jose, USA, 2009, (program committee).
• ACM2009, Multimedia and Security Workshop 2009, Princeton, USA, 7-8 September 2009 (program committee)
• SIP2009, The 10th IASTED International Conference on SIGNAL AND IMAGE PROCESSING SIP 2009, August 17-19, 2009, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (international program committee)
• Electronic Imaging 2008, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents X, San Jose, USA, January, 2008 (program committee)
• The 9th IASTED International Conference on Signal and Image Processing SIP2008, Kailua-Kona, USA, August 18-20, 2008 (program committee)
• 15th European Signal Processing Conference EUSIPCO 2007, Poznan, Poland, September 2007, (technical program committee)
• ACM Multimedia and Security Workshop 2007, Dallas, USA, September, 2007 (program committee)
• International Workshop on Digital Watermarking IWDW2007, Guangzhou, China, November 2007 (program committee)
• Electronic Imaging 2007, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX, San Jose, USA, January, 2007 (program committee)
• ACM Multimedia and Security Workshop 2006, Geneva, Switzerland, September, 2006 (general chair)
• Electronic Imaging 2006, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VIII, San Jose, USA, January, 2006 (program committee)
• International Workshop on Digital Watermarking IWDW2006, Seoul, Korea, October 30 -November 1, 2006 (program committee)
• IEEE International Conference on Image Processing ICIP2006, Atlanta, USA, October 8-11, 2006 (technical program committee)
• The 8th IASTED International Conference on Signal and Image Processing SIP2006, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, August 14-16, 2006 (program committee)
• ACM Multimedia and Security Workshop 2005, New York, USA, August, 2005 (program committee)
• Workshop on Content Representation, Classification and Security MRCS2006, Istanbul, Turkey, December, 2006 (program committee and special chair co-chairman)
• 13th European Signal Processing Conference EUSIPCO2005, Antalya, Turkey, September 4-8, 2005 (co-chairman of special session on Security of Data-Hiding and Watermarking)
• International Workshop on Digital Watermarking IWDW2005, Siena, Italy, September 15-17, 2005 (program committee)
• The 7th IASTED International Conference on Signal and Image Processing SIP2005, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, August 15-17, 2005 (program committee)
• IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing MMSP2004, Siena, Italy, September 29- October 1, 2004 (program committee)
• International Workshop on Digital Watermarking IWDW2004, Seoul, Korea, October 30- November 1, 2004 (program committee)
• ACM Multimedia and Security Workshop 2004, Magdeburg, Germany, September 20-21, 2004 (program committee)
• Electronic Imaging 2004, Multimedia security and watermarking VI, Santa Clara, USA, January, 2004 (organizer and chairman of special session on Security and Protecton of Printed Documents)
• IEEE International Conference Multimedia and Expo ICME2003, Baltimore, USA,(technical program committee)
• The 6th International conference on Telecommunications in Modern Satellite, Cable and Broadcasting Services, Nis, Serbia and Montenegro, October 1-3, 2003, (chairman of special session on Telecommunication Networks)
• Electronic Imaging 2003, Multimedia security and watermarking V, Santa Clara, USA, January, 2003, (chairman of session)

Editorial duties:

• Associated editor of ELSEVIER Journal on Computer Standards and Interfaces.
• Associated editor of EURASIP Journal on Information Security (EURASIP IJS).
• Associated editor of International Journal of Image & Graphics.
• Guest editor of Signal Processing special issue on Security of Data Hiding Technologies (2003).

• Multimedia Security;
• Elements of Multiuser Information Theory and Wireless Communications;
• Elements of Information Theory;
• Advanced Image Processing.

• Frederic Schoenahl
• Taras Holotyak
• Farzad Farhadzadeh
• Saoussen Belhassen

Former PhD students

• Renato Villan (PhD, 2008)
• Emre Topak (PhD, 2007)
• Jose Vila Forcen (PhD, 2006)
• Teodor Alecu (PhD, 2005)
• Mohammad Reza Ay (PhD, 2005)
• Oleksiy Koval (PhD, 2004)
• Frederic Deguillaume (PhD, 2002)

• 1988-1993 : Student, Lviv Polytechnic Institute (Ukraine), Radio Engineer Degree with honour. Topic of Diploma “Elaboration and Computer Simulation of Radar Object Recognition Method”;
• 1993-1995 : researcher, Lviv Research Radio Engineering Institute (Ukraine): I worked on signal and image analysis problems for object detection, tracking and recognition in radar and radiometry applications, antenna design and inverse problems;
• 1993-1996 : PhD student, State University “Lvivska polytechnika” (Ukraine), Faculty of Radio Engineering. Topic of PhD “Radiometry imaging system with adaptive-parametric signal processing” (Prof. Z. Grytskiv and Dr. I.Pruduys);
• 1996-1997 : collaborate with Institute for Condensed Matter Physics, National Academy of Science of Ukraine (Lviv, Ukraine) (Profs. M.Shovgenuk and M.Kozlovskiy): I worked on visual infromation encryption, styganography and encoding for author copyright protection;
• 1996-2002 : Lecturer and later Associate Professor, State University “Lvivska polytechnika” (Ukraine), Faculty of Radio Engineering, Department of Radio Engineering Devices; member of Microwave Imaging Group (Dr. I. Pruduys) and Digital Signal and Image Processing Group (Prof. Z. Grytskiv);
• August 1998 - January 1999: Postdoctoral Research Associate at Coordinated Science Laboratory , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) and collaborated with Image Formation and Processing Group at Backman Institute. I was participating in DARPA project “Design and Optimization of Passive and Active Imaging Radar” (Profs. R. Blahut, Y. Bresler, P. Moulin and D. Munson);
• February 1999-now : Department of Computer Science, University of Geneva. Currently as an Associate Professor.

Current research:

• privacy preserving search in large scale distributed systems;
• privacy preserving identification and authentication;
• fast algorithms for multimedia data search, copy detection and identification in large databases;
• attacks against watermarking and privacy preserving systems;
• statistical machine learning and universal hypothesis testing;
• robust hashing and physical unclonable features;
• information-theoretic aspects of data-hiding;
• security analysis of data-hiding codes and robust hashing;
• secure identification and authentication codes.

Previous research covers the following topics:

• Radar and radiometry imaging systems;
• Antenna design and sensor planning for imaging applications;
• Bayesian image restoration and denoising;
• Robust estimators and inverse problems;
• Stochastic image modeling;
• Image steganography, watermarking and data-hiding;
• Coding in distributed networks;
• Information-theoretic multimodal signal processing.

Developed tools:

• privacy preserving multimedia search;
• item identification based on physical unclonable functions;
• hybrid robust digital watermarking and tamper proofing: BERKUT 1.0 and 2.0;
• document authentication after media conversion: upcoming BERKUT 3.0;
• text embedding for electronic (Word, pdf, ps) and printed document authentication: StegoText;
• joint visual scrambling and error resilient coding;
• low-rate facial image compression for biometric person authentication.

• 1996: The Young Scientists award for participation in XXV General Assembly of the International Union of Radio Science (Lille, France), 1996.
• 1998: The Best Young Author Paper “Adaptive Aperture Formation Matched with Radiometry Image Spatial Spectrum” (in co-authorship with T. Holotyak) on XII IEEE International Conference on Microwaves & Radar, MIKON'98, Krakow, Poland, May 20-22, 1998.
• 2002: The best paper award of ITG 2002 for the paper of Year 2001.
• 2003: Awarded SNF Professorship grant.
• 2007: Awarded extended SNF Professorship grant for the career development.

List of publications