Striped-texture image segmentation with application to multimedia security

In today’s rapid growth of volume of multimedia data, security is important yet challenging problem in multimedia applications. Image, which covers the highest percentage of the multimedia data, it is very important for multimedia security. Image segmentation is utilized as a fundamental preprocessing of various multimedia applications such as surveillance for security by breaking a given image into multiple salient regions. In this paper, we present a new image segmentation approach based on frequency-domain filtering for images with stripe texture, and generalize it to lattice fence images. Our method significantly reduces the impact of stripes on segmentation performance. The approach proposed in this paper consists of three phases. Given the images, we weaken the effect of stripe texture by filtering in the frequency domain automatically. Then, structure-preserving image smoothing is employed to remove texture details and extract the main image structures. Last, we use an effective threshold method to produce segmentation results. Our method achieves very promising results for the test image dataset and could benefit a number of new multimedia applications such as public security.

     

Secure multimedia data processing scheme in medical applications

People communicate in a variety of ways via multimedia through the propagation of various techniques. Nowadays, variety of multimedia frameworks or techniques is used in various applications such as industries, software processing, vehicles and medical systems. The usage of multimedia frameworks in healthcare systems makes it possible to process, record and store huge amount of information generated by various medical records. However, the processing and management of huge records of every individual lead to overload the security risk and human efforts. The aim of this paper is to propose a secure and efficient technique that helps the medical organizations to process every record of individuals in a secure and efficient way. The proposed mechanism is validated against various security and processing metrics over conventional mechanisms such as Response Time, Message Alteration Record, Trusted Classification Accuracy and Record Accuracy. The analyzed results claim the significant improvement of proposed mechanism as compare to other schemes.

     

A secure data analytics scheme for multimedia communication in a decentralized smart grid

With the exponential increase in energy demands (commercial as well as residential), the traditional grid infrastructure significantly shifted to intelligent ICT-based Smart Grid (SG) infrastructure. In the SG environment, only efficient energy management may not be sufficient as the SG dynamics have significant impacts on multimedia communications such as video surveillance of the technical/non-technical losses of energy and many more. The inevitable energy losses can be identified by process and analyze the massive amount of heterogeneous data, i.e., Big Data (BD) generated through smart devices such as sensors, Smart Meters (SMs), and others. The key challenges in analyzing multimedia BD are computational complexity, operational integration complexity, data security, and privacy. To overcome the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based data analytics scheme called ChoIce, which offers secure data collection, analysis, and decision support for the SG systems. It works in two phases; (i) secure data collection over Ethereum and (ii) BD analytics and decision-making using deep learning (DL). The robust and secure data analytics, efficient network management, and high-performance computing for BD are crucial towards the optimization of SG operation. The performance of ChoIce is evaluated considering parameters such as the data storage cost, multimedia communication latency, and prediction accuracy. Thus, the results of ChoIce shows that it outperforms in contrast to other state-of-the-art approaches.

     

Security-enhanced cloud-based image secret sharing and authentication using POB number system

Recently, the image secret sharing technique based on POB (Permutation Ordered Binary) number systems has drawn attention in academia. Thanks to Singh et al.’s pioneer in combining image confidentiality and authentication to form a cloud-based image cryptosystem using the POB number system. However, for image confidentiality and integrity, there are always two main concerns of a new image cryptosystem: the protection from unauthorized disclosure and the sensitivity of tampering. To claim confidentiality and integrity guaranty of secure image cryptosystems is meaningful only when the cryptanalysis is taken into consideration. In this article, Singh et al.’s scheme has undergone the scrutiny and potential security weaknesses found. First, the secret image may leak under chosen-plain-image attacks. Second, the partial secret key deducible under cipher/share-image-only attacks is shown unneglectable. Precisely, it is potentially problematic since the security of image authentication only relies on the secrecy of the parameter r of POB number systems, but the parameter is also learned to know by a heuristic method. The main weak design has been shown by means of introducing theoretical analyses and conducting some counter experiments. As a result, in this study we have focused on proposing a security-enhanced POB-based image secret sharing scheme with five primary advantages: (1) high security to confidentiality, (2) lossless reconstructed secret image, (3) high security to integrity, (4) high detection accuracy, and (5) low time complexity. The experimental results and the further analysis demonstrate that the simple and secure improvement does work.

     

High‐accuracy hierarchical parallel technique for hidden Markov model‐based 3D magnetic resonance image brain segmentation

Scientific applications represent a dominant sector of compute‐intensive applications. Using massively parallel processing systems increases the feasibility to automate such applications because of the cooperation among multiple processors to perform the designated task. This paper proposes a parallel hidden Markov model (HMM) algorithm for 3D magnetic resonance image brain segmentation using two approaches. In the first approach, a hierarchical/multilevel parallel technique is used to achieve high performance for the running algorithm. This approach can speed up the computation process up to 7.8× compared with a serial run. The second approach is orthogonal to the first and tries to help in obtaining a minimum error for 3D magnetic resonance image brain segmentation using multiple processes with different randomization paths for cooperative fast minimum error convergence. This approach achieves minimum error level for HMM training not achievable by the serial HMM training on a single node. Then both approaches are combined to achieve both high accuracy and high performance simultaneously. For 768 processing nodes of a Blue Gene system, the combined approach, which uses both methods cooperatively, can achieve high‐accuracy HMM parameters with 98% of the error level and 2.6× speedup compared with the pure accuracy‐oriented approach alone. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ID-based proxy signature scheme with message recovery

A proxy signature scheme, introduced by Mambo, Usuda and Okamoto, allows an entity to delegate its signing rights to another entity. Identity based public key cryptosystems are a good alternative for a certificate based public key setting, especially when efficient key management and moderate security are required. From inception several ID-based proxy signature schemes have been discussed, but no more attention has been given to proxy signature with message recovery. In this paper, we are proposing provably secure ID-based proxy signature scheme with message recovery and we have proved that our scheme is secure as existential forgery-adaptively chosen message and ID attack. As proposed scheme is efficient in terms of communication overhead and security, it can be a good alternative for certificate based proxy signatures, used in various applications such as wireless e-commerce, mobile agents, mobile communication and distributed shared object systems, etc.     

面向语音合成的藏语单音素与三音素自动切分算法研究

在构建藏语语料库时要对语音进行音素切分, 采用了两种方法, 即基于单音素HMM模型的自动切分方法和基于三音素HMM模型的自动切分方法。通过实验分析了这两种HMM模型的自动切分结果的准确率程度, 其中单音素、三音素总的平均切分准确度分别为80. 69%、88. 74%。实验结果表明, 三音素HMM模型的自动切分方法的准确率明显高于单音素HMM模型的切分率, 提高了语音语料库标注信息的精确度和一致性。     

Symmetric keys image encryption and decryption using 3D chaotic maps with DNA encoding technique

In present digital era, multimedia like images, text, documents and videos plays a vital role, therefore due to increase in usage of digital data; there comes high demand of security. Encryption is a technique used to secure and protect the images from unfair means. In cryptography, chaotic maps play an important role in forming strong and effective encryption algorithm. In this paper 3D chaotic logistic map with DNA encoding is used for confusion and diffusion of image pixels. Additionally, three symmetric keys are used to initialize 3D chaos logistic map, which makes the encryption algorithm strong. The symmetric keys used are 32 bit ASCII key, Chebyshev chaotic key and prime key. The algorithm first applies 3D non-linear logistic chaotic map with three symmetric keys in order to generate initial conditions. These conditions are then used in image row and column permutation to create randomness in pixels. The third chaotic sequence generated by 3D map is used to generate key image. Diffusion of these random pixels are done using DNA encoding; further XOR logical operation is applied between DNA encoded input image and key image. Analysis parameters like NPCR, UACI, entropy, histogram, chi-square test and correlation are calculated for proposed algorithm and also compared with different existing encryption methods.

     

Video compression using frame redundancy elimination and discrete cosine transform coefficient reduction

The need of human beings for better social media applications has increased tremendously. This increase has necessitated the need for a digital system with a larger storage capacity and more processing power. However, an increase in multimedia content size reduces the overall processing performance. This occurs because the process of storing and retrieving large files affects the execution time. Therefore, it is extremely important to reduce the multimedia content size. This reduction can be achieved by image and video compression. There are two types of image or video compression: lossy and lossless. In the latter compression, the decompressed image is an exact copy of the original image, while in the former compression, the original and the decompressed image differ from each other. Lossless compression is needed when every pixel matters. This can be found in autoimage processing applications. On the other hand, lossy compression is used in applications that are based on human visual system perception. In these applications, not every single pixel is important; rather, the overall image quality is important. Many video compression algorithms have been proposed. However, the balance between compression rate and video quality still needs further investigation. The algorithm developed in this research focuses on this balance. The proposed algorithm exhibits diversity of compression stages used for each type of information such as elimination of redundant and semi redundant frames, elimination by manipulating consecutive XORed frames, reducing the discrete cosine transform coefficients based on the wanted accuracy and compression ratio. Neural network is used to further reduce the frame size. The proposed method is a lossy compression type, but it can reach the near-lossless type in terms of image quality and compression ratio with comparable execution time.

     

Real-time video security system using chaos- improved advanced encryption standard (IAES)

Real-time multimedia applications are increasingly achieving success in the everyday world. Thereby, multimedia information relies on security to protect private life. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has been designed to secure different applications. Yet, some limitations are given, making it inappropriate for secure video storation and transmission. The limitations are the time complexity, the multiple iterations, and the predefined substitution box. Thus, any user can use it to break the encryption. Moreover, the multiple iterations augment the need for CPU usage, and so the overall run time. Hence, it is necessary to modify the AES algorithm to make it more appropriate for securing video frames transmission over insecure channel. In this paper, an Improved AES (IAES) is put forward, which improves both diffusion and confusion in ciphered video. Our work consists in the following two main points: First, we propose to eliminate both shift-row and sub-byte transformations and replace them with a mix-row operation. This task reduces the run time, which presents a significant factor for real-time video transmission. Equally important, we propose to use the henon chaotic map in the key generation procedure, which provides more randomness. The Hash Algorithm SHA-3 is used to generate the initial conditions of the chaotic attractor. The video encryption procedure is verified with success, and the experimental results confirm that the novel algorithm combining chaos and IAES augments the entropy of the ciphered video by 15% and reduces the complexity time for both encryption and decryption compared to the standard one. Security analysis is successfully performed, and the results prove that our suggested technique provides the basics of cryptography with more correctness. The PRNG is tested by NIST 800–22 test suit, which indicates that it is suitable for secure image encryption. It provides a large key space of 2¹²⁸ which resists the brute-force attack. All in all, the findings confirm that the novel security approach eliminates the limitation of the existing AES and provides a trade-off between speed and safety levels to secure video transmission.

     

Sketch‐Based Editing Tools for Tumour Segmentation in 3D Medical Images

In the past years sophisticated automatic segmentation algorithms for various medical image segmentation problems have been developed. However, there are always cases where automatic algorithms fail to provide an acceptable segmentation. In these cases the user needs efficient segmentation editing tools, a problem which has not received much attention in research. We give a comprehensive overview on segmentation editing for three‐dimensional (3D) medical images. For segmentation editing in two‐dimensional (2D) images, we discuss a sketch‐based approach where the user modifies the segmentation in the contour domain. Based on this 2D interface, we present an image‐based as well as an image‐independent method for intuitive and efficient segmentation editing in 3D in the context of tumour segmentation in computed tomography (CT). Our editing tools have been evaluated on a database containing 1226 representative liver metastases, lung nodules and lymph nodes of different shape, size and image quality. In addition, we have performed a qualitative evaluation with radiologists and technical experts, proving the efficiency of our tools.     

Accelerating compute intensive medical imaging segmentation algorithms using hybrid CPU-GPU implementations

Medical image processing is one of the most famous image processing fields in this era. This fame comes because of the big revolution in information technology that is used to diagnose many illnesses and saves patients lives. There are many image processing techniques used in this field, such as image reconstructing, image segmentation and many more. Image segmentation is a mandatory step in many image processing based diagnosis procedures. Many segmentation algorithms use clustering approach. In this paper, we focus on Fuzzy C-Means based segmentation algorithms because of the segmentation accuracy they provide. In many cases, these algorithms need long execution times. In this paper, we accelerate the execution time of these algorithms using Graphics Process Unit (GPU) capabilities. We achieve performance enhancement by up to 8.9x without compromising the segmentation accuracy.     

Perfect forward secrecy in VoIP networks through design a lightweight and secure authenticated communication scheme

With the growth of the internet, development of IP based services has increased. Voice over IP (VoIP) technology is one of the services which works based on the internet and packet switching networks and uses this structure to transfer the multimedia data e.g. voices and images. Recently, Chaudhry et al., Zhang et al. and Nikooghadam et al. have presented three authentication and key agreement protocols, separately. However, in this paper, it is proved that the presented protocols by Chaudhry et al. and also Nikooghadam et al. do not provide the perfect forward secrecy, and the presented protocol by Zhang et al. not only is vulnerable to replay attack, and known session-specific temporary information attack, but also does not provide user anonymity, re-registration and revocation, and violation of fast error detection. Therefore, a secure and efficient two-factor authentication and key agreement protocol is presented. The security analysis proves that our proposed protocol is secure against various attacks. Furthermore, security of proposed scheme is formally analyzed using BAN logic and simulated by means of the AVISPA tool. The simulation results demonstrate security of presented protocol against active and passive attacks. The communication and computation cost of the proposed scheme is compared with previously proposed authentication schemes and results confirm superiority of the proposed scheme.

     

A survey on information hiding using video steganography

In the last few decades, information security has gained huge importance owing to the massive growth in digital communication; hence, driving steganography to the forefront for secure communication. Steganography is a practice of concealing information or message in covert communication which involves hiding the information in any multimedia file such as text, image, or video. Many contributions have been made in the domain of image steganography; however, due to the low embedding capacity and robustness of images; videos are gaining more attention of academic researchers. This paper aims to provide a qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of various video steganography techniques by highlighting their properties, challenges, pros, and cons. Moreover, different quality metrics for the evaluation of distinct steganography techniques have also been discussed. The paper also provides an overview of steganalysis attacks which are commonly employed to test the security of the steganography techniques. The experimental analysis of some of the prominent techniques using different quality metrics has also been done. This paper also presented a critical analysis driven from the literature and the experimental results. The primary objective of this paper is to help the beginners to understand the basic concepts of this research domain to initiate their research in this field. Further, the paper highlighted the real-life applications of video steganography and also suggested some future directions which require the attention of the research community.

     

A color image authenticated encryption using conic curve and Mersenne twister

A robust secure image transmission scheme has to achieve all the security services as confidentiality, authentication, integrity and nonrepudiation with a reasonable efficiency. An authenticated image encryption scheme which achieves all these services is proposed in this paper. The scheme uses pseudorandom sequence Public-key cryptosystem design based on factoring and discrete logarithmsenerated by Mersenne’s twister with XOR operation for image encryption and proposes two hard problems based digital signature: conic curve discrete logarithm problem (CCDLP) and Integer Factorization Problem (IFP) which achieves a highly secure system with efficient point operations and inverses. For efficient transmission, the image signature is embedded in the cipher image. Security analysis of the scheme is provided. According to the results, the proposed scheme is efficient and achieves an excellent long term security.

     

An enhanced encryption algorithm for video based on multiple Huffman tables

Encryption is one of the fundamental technologies that is used in the security of multimedia data. Unlike ordinary computer applications, multimedia applications generate large amount of data that has to be processed in real time. This work investigates the problem of efficient multimedia data encryption. A scheme known as the Randomized Huffman Table scheme was recently proposed to achieve encryption along with compression. Though this scheme has several advantages it cannot overcome the chosen plaintext attack. An enhancement of this Huffman scheme is proposed in this work which essentially overcomes the attack and improves the security. The proposed encryption approach consists of two modules. The first module is the Randomized Huffman Table module, the output of which is fed to the second XOR module to enhance the performance. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can withstand the chosen plaintext attack. The efficiency and security of the proposed scheme makes it an ideal choice for real time secure multimedia applications.     

Resource Management in a Distributed Computer System with Allowance for the Level of Trust to Computational Components

This article considers the ensuring of secure data processing in distributed computer systems (DCSs), which is important for a certain class of computing tasks. An approach to the resource management in DCSs is proposed that makes it possible to take into account, according to user requirements, both the time spent on the execution of a task and the security level of the system resources involved in its execution.     

A Combined Watermarking and Encryption Algorithm for Secure VoIP

ABSTRACT

In the proposed technique we have merged two layers of security, namely, the watermarking layer and the secure channel management layer used in the framework of a real time multimedia security system. The joint layer embeds watermark to the host signal and deploys encryption simultaneously to protect multimedia data, thereby reducing the processing delay. The scheme supports G.729 codec bit-stream. Encryption is done using Data Encryption Standard (DES) protocol. The computation time and watermark-embedding rate is evaluated for the proposed algorithm.     

An ASCII based effective and multi-operation image encryption method

The main challenge for American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) based image encryption methods is to increase security with less computational cost. Earlier, well known image encryption techniques are not only deficient in performance but also lacked in embedding of confidential data in an image using ASCII based methods. Therefore, this study aims to contribute an ASCII based efficient and secure image encryption method having additional feature of embedding confidential data in an image. Moreover, the embedding process is not static but it is dynamic as compared to the existing work. The novelty of proposed method encompasses optimal security, effective encryption speed and randomized embedding of secret data in an image even of having multi-operations. The proposed method was evaluated experimentally with variety of tests such as Pixel correlation analysis, Number of Pixels Change Rate (NPCR), Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), Histogram, Entropy, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Square Error (MSE) including encryption decryption time. Thus the experimental results show that the proposed method is optimally secure and outperformed in image encryption as well as in randomized embedding of confidential data than the existing techniques.