Guest Editorial: Multimedia Information Security and Its Applications in Cloud Computing

Multimedia applications are omnipresent in our daily lives, however, a lot of relevant security issues have emerged as well, such as covert communication using multimedia files, copy-move forgery in digital images and videos, and biometric spoofing. To address these issues, many multimedia information security techniques were proposed by utilizing the methods in areas like machine learning, signal and image processing, and communications. Nevertheless, there still exist some obvious shortcomings in the research methodologies. Current multimedia security studies are often based on the strict conditions that are nearly impossible to meet up in real world. Furthermore, high computational complexity of current methods makes it hard to handle the big data in the environment of cloud computing. All these drawbacks limit the applications of the forensics and other secure techniques in practice, which deserve the in-depth investigations. This special issue aims to bring together the latest research works in the related fields of multimedia information security, which emphasizes on the novel and efficient methodologies that have the potentials to be applied in secure cloud computing. According to the rigorous review procedure consisting of several rounds, each of the 34 manuscripts submitted to the special issue was technically reviewed by at least three anonymous experts. Finally, 18 papers are selected to be included in this special issue, which fall into five main categories: (1) steganography (4 papers), (2) steganalysis (5 papers), (3) Multimed Tools Appl https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-5831-x