A research team from CSE department has won the first place at Track 2 (Proof of concept and Demos) of the 2nd annual Artificial Intelligence National Competition announced today by the organizing committee. The team consists of Nandhini Subramanian (Research Assistant and former CSE MSc student), Dr. Omar Elharrouss, Post Doc Researcher at our department, and Prof. Somaya Al Maadeed. The winning demo is titled “Reversible Image Steganography Using Auto Encoder-Decoder Deep Learning Methods”, which is part of QNRF NPRP11S-0113- 180276 project.

Image steganography is used to hide secret images inside the cover image in plain sight. Traditionally, the secret data is converted into binary bits and the cover image is manipulated statistically to embed the secret binary bits. Overloading the cover image may lead to distortions and the secret information may become visible. Hence the hiding capacity of the traditional methods are limited. In their project, an unique, light-weight and simple deep convolutional auto encoder architecture is proposed to embed the secret image inside the cover image as well as to extract the embedded secret image from the reconstructed stego image.

The AI national competition is a national competition challenging students, developers, professionals, and researchers to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to tackle some challenges for different applications. It raises awareness of AI technologies in Qatar, supports building local capacity in this timely and crucial area, and provides a platform for participants to share AI ideas and applications.