Multimedia to become more secure The barrage of multimedia files being created and distributed often suffers from security violations, authenticity validation and searchability challenges. A new suite of high-tech tools promises to be a game changer in this respect. Digital Economy © Shutterstock More and more multimedia files are being generated and shared every day, giving rise to many challenges in managing these files, particularly when it comes to efficiently searching and verifying contents. Keeping in mind that multimedia files can be easily altered, currently available security solutions are not adequately effective in verifying integrity and authenticity. The EU-funded MAVEN (Management and authenticity verification of multimedia contents) project worked on developing new tools for multimedia data management and security. It proposed a ‘search and verify’ approach that automatically searches digital contents for objects of interest using advanced audio-visual pattern recognition tools, and applies forensic analysis to ascertain authenticity and integrity. To achieve its aims, the project team developed a comprehensive software framework with both forensic tools and search tools. The forensic tools were designed to conduct effective verification of image source, image integrity and video integrity. The search tools, on the other hand, were aimed at text localisation/recognition, spoken keyword detection, face detection/recognition, and object/scene recognition. All the tools were validated during the project, which also developed a demonstrator application that showcases the MAVEN suite’s features, including its integrability and modularity. The security component of the suite can be very useful for law enforcement authorities and for investigating legal issues. In parallel, the media component shows much promise for advancing automatic search and classification related to information retrieval. The consortium of small and medium-sized enterprises working on the project also stand to gain significantly from the project’s research, as they look to to become more competitive in their field and their markets. Overall, numerous small and medium-sized businesses, as well as law enforcement agencies, insurance companies and media businesses such as television broadcasters are slated to benefit from this technology. The future of multimedia in Europe is finally looking safer and more secure. Keywords Authenticity verification, efficient search, multimedia, MAVEN, security, forensics, biometrics, multimedia information retrieval, content-based information retrieval
