Cédric RICHARD

Director of the CNRS GdR ISIS, Côte d’Azur Observatory, University of Côte d’Azur, Nice, France

With the relentless increase in bandwidth and storage space, as well as the proliferation of mobile devices and the development of new standards, multimedia data is affecting our societies by changing the way that we access data and information. It is also changing our relationship to culture, by transforming interactions between individuals and their relationships with organizations. Multimedia activities are present in all major sectors of activity (security, health, telecommunications, etc.) and have supported their successive developments because of the common backbone they build, from information support to the application and user.

In this context, by protecting confidentiality and copyright, verifying integrity, analyzing and authenticating content, tracing copies and controlling access, particularly critical questions about multimedia data security are being asked. For example, the protection strategies implemented must take into account the specific needs of multimedia while meeting the requirements of the means of communication, thus establishing a compromise. A wrong approach can indeed lead to excessive coding of the data, or the alteration of their perceptual quality, and thus failure in the targeted security objectives.

As an interface discipline, the art of multimedia security is difficult!

However, with this two-part book, William Puech and his co-authors take up the challenge brilliantly by painting an exhaustive and current panorama of multimedia security. They offer an in-depth analysis of authentication and hidden data embedding methods, biometric technologies and multimedia protection and encryption processes. Without giving in to an outdated formalism that could hinder the fluidity of their presentations, the authors captivate the reader by presenting the state of the art of each subject directly and in an illustrative way.

William Puech and the contributors to this book have provided considerable work to their French-speaking scientific communities of information, signal, image, vision and computer security, represented by the two appropriate French GdR groups of the CNRS. I would like to express all of my gratitude to them.