Congratulations with your PhD degree Ali Khodabakhsh. Today Ali has defended his PhD entitled «Automated Authentication of Audiovisual Contents: A Biometric Approach». His work is carried out at the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology.

Ali defended his thesis on Friday 18 from Trondheim June via Zoom. Here is a brief summary.

We are no longer strangers to the phenomenon of Deepfakes and the immense risks it poses to societies. To counter the threat, it is of utmost importance to develop technical tools which facilitate content authentication and hinder the spread of fake content in the media. In this thesis, studies have been undertaken to assess the threat surface and identify subjective vulnerabilities that require immediate attention. Accordingly, effective detection mechanisms have been proposed for the alleviation of the discovered vulnerabilities. In addition, the efficacy of the state-of-the-art detection techniques has been evaluated and solutions have been proposed for the problem of generalizability which is the largest impediment to the deployment of these solutions.

Read the full electronic version of the thesis.

Assessment committee

• 1. opponent: Professor Hazim Ekenel, Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Istanbul, Turkey
• 2. opponent: Professor Siwei Lyu, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA
• Member and Administrator: Associate Professor Katrien De Moor, Department of Information Security and Communication Technology, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

Ali Khodabakhsh's main supervisor has been Professor Christoph Busch, IIK, NTNU and co-supervisor Professor Raghavendra Ramachandra, IIK, NTNU.