Anomaly Detection and Identification of Natural Data using Benford’s Law

Abstract

This talk will present an overview of the theory and applications of Benford’s law for anomaly detection in natural data. Some examples will be highlighted including the detection of glare effect in images and classification of biometric images for privacy protection, as well as security attacks related to network traffic data. Recent research based on this law has further shown that consistent anomaly patterns could be achieved for different network attacks, leading to the potential identification/pattern recognition of various types of attacks. Moreover, Benford’s law has also been successfully applied for the detection of Alzheimer’s Disease based on Electroencephalogram (EEG) data and this will be highlighted in the presentation.

Biography

Professor Anthony T.S. Ho served as Head of Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey from 2010 to 2015. He is also a Tianjin Distinguished Professor, Guest Professors of Tianjin University of Science and Technology and of Wuhan University of Technology, China. He was the recipient of the prestigious Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Innovation in Engineering Award under the Security category for his research and commercialization work on digital watermarking in 2006. Professor Ho obtained his BSc (Hons) in Physical Electronics from Northumbria University in 1979, his MSc in Applied Optics from Imperial College London in 1980 and his PhD in Digital Image Processing from King’s College London, University of London in 1983. After graduation, he worked in technical management positions in industry for 11 years in the UK and Canada. From 1994 to 2005, He was a Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He has published more than 150 articles in international journals and conference proceedings as well as 8 international patents granted related to watermarking and steganography. Professor Ho is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Information Security and Applications (JISA) and an Area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication, both published by Elsevier. He was appointed as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) for three years commencing January 2016, He has also served as Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL) (2014-2016), as well as an Associate Editor for EURASIP Journal of Image and Video Processing published by Springer. Professor Ho is a Fellow of Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), Fellow of Institute of Physics (FInstP) and Fellow of British Computer Society (FBCS).