Media Forensics friends and professionals,

We are excited to announce a virtual workshop, OpenMFC 2021, in conjunction with TRECVID 2021 on Tuesday, Dec. 7 to Friday, Dec. 10, 2021 (EST)!  

The TRECVID/OpenMFC workshop is organized by teams in the Information Access Division (IAD), Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

OpenMFC (evaluation website) is an evaluation series open to public participants worldwide to support media forensics research and help advance the state-of-the-art imagery (image and video) forensics technologies. 

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to several emerging technologies such as deepfakes, CGI, provenance, and anti-forensics techniques, which significantly threaten the trustworthiness of media content. To detect inadvertent misinformation or deliberate deception via disinformation and ensure digital content trust and authentication, the NIST OpenMFC team provides public researchers with a comprehensive evaluation platform to develop technologies to detect unauthentic imagery and retrieve the digital content provenance. OpenMFC designed a set of evaluation tasks and released a series of media forensics datasets to support the OpenMFC evaluation as well as other related research work. The evaluation is being conducted to examine the performance of the system’s accuracy and robustness over diverse datasets. The participants can visualize their system performance on an online leaderboard evaluation platform. NIST will give an overview of the OpenMFC results in the current year and plan for OpenMFC evaluation for the next year.

The OpenMFC workshop (workshop link, registration link) is open to the public.  During the OpenMFC workshop (workshop agenda), we will invite media forensic experts from academia, industry, and government to present their work on media forensics and system development, AI-synthesized fake media, steganography images and steganalysis, media forensics evaluation, media manipulation and evaluation dataset generation, content authenticity, anti-forensics, etc. The participants will give presentations about their research and how they approached the media forensics challenges. We will use OpenMFC slack channel (https://app.slack.com/client/T017MTH6RHT/C017MTH7LRK) to have discussions, take polls, post questions, collect feedback, present ideas, etc. OpenMFC slack (openmfc.slack.com) is open to public researchers who are interested in media forensics. Please join the slack before the workshop. 

The TRECVID workshop (public workshop link) is a workshop running since 2013. The goal is to encourage research in content-based video retrieval by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results. This year TRECVID tracks include: Ad-hoc Video Search, Instance Search, Video Summarization, Video-to-Text, Disaster Scene Description & Indexing, and Activity Detection in Extended Videos.

This year's OpenMFC workshop will be hosted in conjunction with the TRECVID 2021 workshop. The TRECVID 2021 workshop will be held in the first section starting at 7:00 am EDT and the OpenMFC workshop will be held in the second section ending no later than 2:00 pm EDT. Please refer to the TRECVID 2021 agenda and the OpenMFC 2021 agenda for detailed information. We would like to invite you to both workshops with a single registration process (registration link).

Please feel free to share the workshop information with your colleagues who are interested in imagery authentication, media forensics, or content-based video retrieval.  

Please email me if you have any questions, and I hope to see you on Dec. 7^th, 2021.

Sincerely,

Haiying, On Behalf of The NIST OpenMFC Team