Novel Organometallic Aromatic Azo Polyesters Based on Ferrocene

Some ferrocene containing aromatic azo polyesters were prepared by condensing 1,1-ferrocenedicarbonyl chloride with different azo groups containing aromatic diols, which were synthesized by diazotization coupling reaction from aromatic diamines. The polymeric products were separated as two portions on the basis of their solubility and subsequently characterized by their elemental analysis and FTIR spectral studies. Thermal properties of the products were measured by differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetry and the activation energies of pyrolysis were calculated using Horowitz and Metzger's method. The molecular weights of the soluble portions were determined by gel permeation chromatography (GPC) and these portions were also characterized by their inherent viscosities and UV-Vis spectroscopic studies.     

Mammogram Enhancement Using Lifting Dyadic Wavelet Transform and Normalized Tsallis Entropy

In this paper, we present a new technique for mammogram enhancement using fast dyadic wavelet transform （FDyWT） based on lifted spline dyadic wavelets and normalized Tsallis entropy. First, a mammogram image is decom- posed into a multiscale hierarchy of low-subband and high-subband images using FDyWT. Then noise is suppressed using normalized Tsallis entropy of the local variance of the modulus of oriented high-subband images. After that, the wavelet coefficients of high-subbands are modified using a non-linear operator and finally the low-subband image at the first scale is modified with power law transformation to suppress background. Though FDyWT is shift-invariant and has better poten- tial for detecting singularities like edges, its performance depends on the choice of dyadic wavclcts. On the other hand, the nulnber of vanishing moments is an important characteristic of dyadic wavelets for singularity analysis because it provides an upper bound measurement for singularity characterization. Using lifting dyadic schemes, we construct lifted spline dyadic wavelets of different degrees with increased number of vanishing moments. We also examine the effect of these wavelets on mammogram enhancement. The method is tested on mammogram images, taken from MIAS （Mammographic Image Analysis Society） database, having various background tissue types and containing different abnormalities. The comparison with tile state-of-the-art contrast enhancement methods reveals that the proposed method performs better and the difference is statistically significant.     

Ellipsoidal neighbourhood outlier factor for distributed anomaly detection in resource constrained networks

Anomaly detection in resource constrained wireless networks is an important challenge for tasks such as intrusion detection, quality assurance and event monitoring applications. The challenge is to detect these interesting events or anomalies in a timely manner, while minimising energy consumption in the network. We propose a distributed anomaly detection architecture, which uses multiple hyperellipsoidal clusters to model the data at each sensor node, and identify global and local anomalies in the network. In particular, a novel anomaly scoring method is proposed to provide a score for each hyperellipsoidal model, based on how remote the ellipsoid is relative to their neighbours. We demonstrate using several synthetic and real datasets that our proposed scheme achieves a higher detection performance with a significant reduction in communication overhead in the network compared to centralised and existing schemes.     

Self and static interference mitigation scheme for coexisting wireless networks

High density of coexisting networks in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band leads to static and self interferences among different communication entities. The inevitability of these interferences demands for interference avoidance schemes to ensure reliability of network operations. This paper proposes a novel Diversified Adaptive Frequency Rolling (DAFR) technique for frequency hopping in Bluetooth piconets. DAFR employs intelligent hopping procedures in order to mitigate self interferences, weeds out the static interferer efficiently and ensures sufficient frequency diversity. We compare the performance of our proposed technique with the widely used existing frequency hopping techniques, namely, Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) and Adaptive Frequency Rolling (AFR). Simulation studies validate the significant improvement in goodput and hopping diversity of our scheme compared to other schemes and demonstrate its potential benefit in real world deployment.     

An improved remote user authentication scheme with key agreement

In distributed systems, user authentication schemes based on password and smart card are widely used to ensure only authorized access to the protected services. Recently, Chang et al. presented an untraceable dynamic-identity-based user authentication scheme with verifiable-password-update. In this research, we illustrate that Chang et al.’s scheme violates the purpose of dynamic-identity contrary to authors’ claim. We show that once the smart card of an arbitrary user is lost, passwords of all registered users are at risk. Using information from an arbitrary smart card, an adversary can impersonate any user of the system. In addition, its password change phase has loopholes and is misguiding. The scheme has no provision for session key agreement and the smart card lacks any verification mechanism. Then we come-up with an improved remote user authentication scheme with the session key agreement, and show its robustness over related schemes.     

A Flavanone and Two Phenolic Acids from Chrysanthemum morifolium with Phytotoxic and Insect Growth Regulating Activity

Leaves of Chrysanthemum morifolium cv. Ramat were extracted sequentially with hexane, ethyl acetate, and methanol. The methanol fraction, when incorporated into artificial diet was found to reduce the growth of cabbage looper (Trichoplusia ni Hubner) larvae at concentrations between 500 and 5000 ppm of diet. Fractionation of the methanol extract on a Sephadex column yielded five fractions, three of which reduced the weight of larvae relative to the control. One fraction was analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and found to contain three main constituents. These compounds were purified using a combination of gel permeation chromatography on Sephadex LH20 and HPLC, and analyzed by 1H and 13CNMR as well as undergoing chemical and physical analyses. The compounds were identified as: 1, chlorogenic acid (5-O-caffeoylquinic acid); 2, 3,5-O-dicaffeoylquinic acid; and 3, 3', 4',5-trihydroxyflavanone7-O-glucuronide (eriodictyol7-O-glucuronide). At concentrations between 100 to 1000 ppm these compounds reduced both growth and photosynthesis of Lemna gibba L. with the order of efficacy being: flavanone > chlorogenic acid > 3,5-O-dicaffeoylquinic acid. Furthermore, when incorporated separately into artificial diet these compounds, at 10 to 1000 ppm, enhanced or reduced growth of the cabbage looper (Trichoplusia ni) and gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar L.).     

Chaos based Zero-steganography algorithm

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Conventional steganography focuses on invisibility and undetectability, as the main concern is to make the algorithms immune to steganalysis. Zero-steg-anography...     

Multimedia framework to support eHealth applications

Limited bandwidth resources lead to a number of challenges especially for eHealth applications, which are communicated over IP and wireless networks. These multimedia services include high-resolution videos and have very large file sizes that require a high level of compression to overcome this limitation. Therefore, there is an acute demand for the research community to provide an efficient multimedia framework to encode medical videos with high quality specifically under the conditions of an error-prone environment. Both an affordable delivery framework and effective coding techniques are extremely desirable for the delivery of high-quality eHealth video applications for transmission over heterogeneous networks and devices. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a multimedia framework to support eHealth applications, which has an improved coding scheme that uses an SVC-scalable extension of MPEC-4 AVC/H.264. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a significant improvement in terms of the PSNR-Y gain and reduces the picture quality degradation caused by artifacts and distortions, compared to the existing scheme.     

An adaptive watermarking scheme for e-government document images

This paper proposes an adaptive watermarking scheme for e-government document images. The adaptive scheme combines the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the singular value decomposition (SVD) using luminance masking. As a core of masking model in the human visual system (HVS), luminance masking is implemented to improve noise sensitivity. Genetic algorithm (GA), subsequently, is employed for the optimization of the scaling factor of the masking. Involving a number of steps, the scheme proposed through this study begins by calculating the mask of the host image using luminance masking. It is then continued by transforming the mask on each area into all frequencies domain. The watermark image, following this, is embedded by modifying the singular values of DCT-transformed host image with singular values of mask coefficient of host image and the control parameter of DCT-transformed watermark image using Genetic Algorithm (GA). The use of both the singular values and the control parameter respectively, in this case, is not only to improve the sensitivity of the watermark performance but also to avoid the false positive problem. The watermark image, afterwards, is extracted from the distorted images. The experiment results show the improved adaptive performance of the proposed scheme is in resistant to several types of attacks in comparison with the previous schemes; the adaptive performance refers to the adaptive parameter of the luminance masking functioned to improve the performance or robustness of an image from any attacks.