Alessandro Piva

Department of Information Engineering
Università degli Studi di Firenze
Via di S. Marta, 3 - 50139 Firenze Italia
Telefono +39 0552758584
e-mail: alessandro.piva(at)unifi.it

Head of FORLAB, Multimedia Forensics Laboratory

IEEE Fellow, and member of the IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee.

Alessandro Piva received the Laurea degree (cum laude) in Electronics Engineering (Telecommunication branch) in 1995 from the University of Firenze and the Ph.D. degree in "Information and Telecommunications Engineering" from the University of Florence, discussing the thesis "A DCT-Domain Watermarking System for Copyright Protection of Digital Images".

He received a Research Grant on "Watermarking of digital images for secure distribution over telematic networks" obtained from the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, University of Florence, from 2000 to 2002. From 2002 until 2004 he was Research Scientist at the National Inter-university Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT).

From January 2005 until October 2014, he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, now  Department of Information Engineering, of the University of Florence. Since November 2014, he is Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence.

He's also involved in the research activities of CNIT and of the Media Integration and Communication Center of Excellence (MICC).

• Research

Current research interests include the following areas:

Multimedia security and protection, with particular reference to digital watermarking and multimedia forensics.

He started working on the use of digital watermarking for image protection since the late nineties. For more than 15 years, he contributed to build a solid theoretical framework for watermarking and developed a wide set of practical methods bridging the gap between theory and practice. More specifically, he has contributed to the development of robust digital watermarking techniques for digital images and video sequences; later on, he has developed some secure watermarking methods for multimedia content protection through the adoption of innovative cryptographic solutions. Regarding multimedia forensics, he contributed to the design of statistical models for the detection and localization of traces left by double compression in images, video and audio files; moreover, he worked on the reliability and efficiency of image forensic tools in practical applications, mainly through the exploitation of decision fusion methods. He also developed a number of forensic techniques exploiting the traces left by the acquisition devices, as well as geometric inconsistencies often associated to image tampering.

Image and Video Processing for Cultural Heritage, medical and industrial applications

in this field he contributed to the development of image processing algorithms that can help the restorers in the analysis during the restoration phases; on the other hand, by means of image processing it is possible to carry out a sort of virtual restoration. The developed tools have been integrated into a package named ArtShop. Multispectral imaging techniques were applied on the CH field to achieve material localization and identification on painting surfaces, and on medical field for early diagnosis of melanoma. Analysis of angiographies for the automatic measuring of diameter and temporal pulsatility in blood vessels was studied; parameter estimation for the automatic recognition of textile (cheratinic) fibres was also studied.

Other research interests included video coding techniques, and multimedia applications in the Cultural Heritage field.

• Teaching

For teaching activity check here.

• Research Projects

The research activity has been developed in the framework of both Italian national projects, as well as Projects funded by the European Community and by DARPA. In particular, he was person responsible for the University of Florence or for the Florence Research Unit of CNIT, of the following Projects:

- UNCHAINED: UNcovering media manipulation CHains through contAINer and contEnt Detectable traces (2020-2022), under the Reverse Engineering of Deceptions (RED) programme
- FENCE (Forensic modulEs for the automated aNalysis of physiCal integrity in imagEs), under the Media Forensics (MediFor) programme funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 2016-2020 (UNIFI)
- FP7 EU Project MAVEN, 2013-2015 (CNIT)
- FP7 EU Project REWIND, 2011-2014 (UNIFI)
- FP7 IST Project LivingKnowledge, 2009-2012 (CNIT)
- EU IST Project SPEED (Signal Processing in the EncryptEd Domain), 2006- 2009 (UNIFI)
- EU Galileo Project CUSPIS (Cultural Heritage Space Management System), 2005- 2006 (UNIFI)
- EU IST Project ECRYPT (European Network of Excellence in Cryptology), 2004- 2008 (CNIT)
- National project PRIN2017  "PREMIER: PREserving Media trustworthiness in the artificial Intelligence ERa" , 2020-2023
- National Project PRIN2007 "Privacy aware processing of encrypted signals for treating sensitive information" co-funded by MIUR, 2008-2010 (UNIFI)
- Project ST@rT - Scienze e Tecnologie per il patrimonio Artistico architettonico ed archeologico Toscano, funded by the Tuscany Region, 2007- 2010, (UNIFI)
- Moreover, he was person responsible of several Research funds received by private companies.

• Technical Assignments

Societies and Committees

- IEEE Fellow
- IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee Member (2011-2013, and Associate Member 2020-2022)
- EURASIP Special Area Team on "Biometrics, Data Forensics, and Security" Member (2016-Present)

Journal Editorial Committees

- Senior Area Editor of Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (2016-Present)
- Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2020-Present)
- Associate Editor of theJournal of Imaging, (2020- Present)
- Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia ( 2013-2016)
- Associate Editor of theIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2015-2019)
- Associate Editor of theJournal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (2016-2017)
- Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology  (2012-2014)
- Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2009-2013)
- Associate Editor of the EURASIP Journal on Information Security  (2006- 2020)
- Associate Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine e-Newsletter  (2007- 2009)
- Co Guest Editor for a Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing on "Image Processing for Cultural Heritage", March 2004.
- Co Guest Editor for a Special Issue of EURASIP Journal on Information Security on "Signal Processing in the Encrypted Domain", 2007.
- Co Guest Editor for a Special Issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on "Visual Cultural Heritage".
- Co Guest Editor for a Special Issue of Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation on "Data-driven multimedia forensics and security", August  2018.

Conference and other events Technical Committees

- Co-Organizer of the First IEEE IFS-TC Image Forensics Challenge.
- General Co-Chair of 2017 Tyrrhenian International Workshop on Digital Communications, September 18-20, 2017, Palermo, Italy.
- Program Co-Chair of 17th International Workshop on Digital-forensics and Watermarking (IWDW2018), Oct. 22-24, 2018, Jeju, Korea.
- Program Co-Chair of 18th International Workshop on Digital-forensics and Watermarking (IWDW2019), Nov. 2-4, 2019, Chengdu, China.
- Program Co-Chair of 19th International Workshop on Digital-forensics and Watermarking (IWDW2020), Nov. 25-27, 2020, Melbourne, Australia.
- Program Co-Chair of 2nd ACM Workshop on Information Hiding & Multimedia Security, June 11-13, 2014, Salzburg, Austria.
- Technical Co-Chair of 2004 International Workshop On Multimedia Signal Processing, Sept. 29 - Oct. 1, 2004, Siena, Italy.
- Conference Chair of First Int. Workshop on Signal Processing in EncryptEd Domain (SPEED2009) , Lausanne, Sept. 10, 2009.
- Publications Chair of Fifth IEEE Int. Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS 2013), Guangzhou, Nov. 18-21, 2013.
- Publications Co-Chair of 2014 IEEE Int. Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP2014), Firenze, Italy, May 4-9, 2014.
- Publications Chair of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) 2018, San Diego, USA, July 23-27, 2018.
- Invited Session Chair of IIHMSP07, November 26-28, 2007, Taiwan.
- Local Organization Chair for 2015 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), Firenze Italy
Area Chair
- for the subject area: "Multimedia Security and Forensics" of IEEE ICME'15.
- for the subject area: "Multimedia Security " of IEEE ISM2015.
- co-Chair of a Special Session on "Media Security", at 6th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS2005) - 13-15 April 2005, Montreux, Switzerland.
- co-Chair of a Special Session on "Cultural Heritage", 14th European Signal Processing Conference EUSIPCO 2006, Firenze, Italy, September 4-8, 2006.
- co-Chair of a Special Session on "Signal Processing in the Encrypted Domain", 16th European Signal Processing Conference EUSIPCO 2008, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 25-29, 2008.
- co-Chair of a Special Session on "Uncovering the processing history of multimedia objects", 20th European Signal Processing Conf. EUSIPCO 2012, Bucharest, Romania, August 27-31, 2012.
- co-Chair of a Special Session on "Video and Image Forensics", 2013 IEEE 15th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP2013), Pula (Sardinia), Italy, September 30 -October 2, 2013.
- Program Committee Member of several International Conferences
- Reviewer for several International Journals

• Awards

- IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2019, for contributions to multimedia security.
In 2010 elected to the grade of Senior Member of the IEEE
- 2012 Best Associate Editor (BAE) Award for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.
- Top-10% paper award at 2013 IEEE 15th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP2013) for the work "Localization of Forgeries in MPEG-2 Video through GOP Size and DQ Analysis".
- APSIPA Sadaoki Furui Prize Paper Award for "An overview on video forensics" (by S. Milani, M. Fontani, P. Bestagini, M. Barni, A. Piva, M. Tagliasacchi, and S. Tubaro) published on APSIPA Trans. on Signal and Information Processing (Vol 1, 2012).

• Publications

Look at the My Scholar profile and at the Scopus Author Detail (Scopus account needed), and my ResearcherID.

The complete list of publications is available here.