An adaptive image steganographic scheme based on Noise Visibility Function and an optimal chaotic based encryption method

Steganography is the science of hiding secret message in an appropriate digital multimedia in such a way that the existence of the embedded message should be invisible to anyone apart from the sender or the intended recipient. This paper presents an irreversible scheme for hiding a secret image in the cover image that is able to improve both the visual quality and the security of the stego-image while still providing a large embedding capacity. This is achieved by a hybrid steganography scheme incorporates Noise Visibility Function (NVF) and an optimal chaotic based encryption scheme. In the embedding process, first to reduce the image distortion and to increase the embedding capacity, the payload of each region of the cover image is determined dynamically according to NVF. NVF analyzes the local image properties to identify the complex areas where more secret bits should be embedded. This ensures to maintain a high visual quality of the stego-image as well as a large embedding capacity. Second, the security of the secret image is brought about by an optimal chaotic based encryption scheme to transform the secret image into an encrypted image. Third, the optimal chaotic based encryption scheme is achieved by using a hybrid optimization of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) which is allowing us to find an optimal secret key. The optimal secret key is able to encrypt the secret image so as the rate of changes after embedding process be decreased which results in increasing the quality of the stego-image. In the extracting process, the secret image can be extracted from the stego-image losslessly without referring to the original cover image. The experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme not only has the ability to achieve a good trade-off between the payload and the stego-image quality, but also can resist against the statistics and image processing attacks.     

Mining citizen emotions to estimate the urgency of urban issues

Crowdsourcing technology offers exciting possibilities for local governments. Specifically, citizens are increasingly taking part in reporting and discussing issues related to their neighborhood and problems they encounter on a daily basis, such as overflowing trash-bins, broken footpaths and lifts, illegal graffiti, and potholes. Pervasive citizen participation enables local governments to respond more efficiently to these urban issues. This interaction between citizens and municipalities is largely promoted by civic engagement platforms, such as See-Click-Fix, FixMyStreet, CitySourced, and OpenIDEO, which allow citizens to report urban issues by entering free text describing what needs to be done, fixed or changed. In order to develop appropriate action plans and priorities, government officials need to figure out how urgent are the reported issues. In this paper we propose to estimate the urgency of urban issues by mining different emotions that are implicit in the text describing the issue. More specifically, a reported issue is first categorized according to the emotions expressed in it, and then the corresponding emotion scores are combined in order to produce a final urgency level for the reported issue. Our experiments use the SeeClickFix hackathon data and diverse emotion classification algorithms. They indicate that (i) emotions can be categorized efficiently with supervised learning algorithms, and (ii) the use of citizen emotions leads to accurate urgency estimates. Further, using additional features such as the type of issue or its author leads to no further accuracy gains.     

RAFNet: RGB-D attention feature fusion network for indoor semantic segmentation

Semantic segmentation based on the complementary information from RGB and depth images has recently gained great popularity, but due to the difference between RGB and depth maps, how to effectively use RGB-D information is still a problem. In this paper, we propose a novel RGB-D semantic segmentation network named RAFNet, which can selectively gather features from the RGB and depth information. Specifically, we construct an architecture with three parallel branches and propose several complementary attention modules. This structure enables a fusion branch and we add the Bi-directional Multi-step Propagation (BMP) strategy to it, which can not only retain the feature streams of the original RGB and depth branches but also fully utilize the feature flow of the fusion branch. There are three kinds of complementary attention modules that we have constructed. The RGB-D fusion module can effectively extract important features from the RGB and depth branch streams. The refinement module can reduce the loss of semantic information and the context aggregation module can help propagate and integrate information better. We train and evaluate our model on NYUDv2 and SUN-RGBD datasets, and prove that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances.     

Bayesian network based general correspondence retrieval method for depth sensing with single-shot structured light

This study reinvestigated one of the most fundamental problems in structure light depth sensing field: correspondence retrieval of features between patterns and images. We formulate the global optimum correspondence retrieval by maximizing a conditional probability of correspondence given observed features, which is depicted by a Bayesian network. Different from traditional “code-only” based correspondence retrieval methods, the proposed Bayesian network based method exploits the positional correlations of correspondences of neighboring features, namely, the correspondences of poorly detected features are estimated with the aid of the correspondences of well detected features. The method performs especially well on challenging scenes with rich depth variations, abrupt depth changes, edges, etc. Experiments show that the proposed method increase the correspondence accuracy by about 40% on challenging scenes, compared with traditional “code-only” based correspondence retrieval methods.     

A novel data-driven approach to support decision-making during production scale-up of assembly systems

In today's manufacturing settings, a sudden increase in the customer demand may enforce manufacturers to alter their manufacturing systems either by adding new resources or changing the layout within a restricted time frame. Without an appropriate strategy to handle this transition to higher volume, manufacturers risk losing their market competitiveness. The subjective experience-based ad-hoc procedures existing in the industrial domain are insufficient to support the transition to a higher volume, thereby necessitating a new approach where the scale-up can be realised in a timely, systematic manner. This research study aims to fulfill this gap by proposing a novel Data-Driven Scale-up Model, known as DDSM, that builds upon kinematic and Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) models. These models are further enhanced by historical production data and knowledge representation techniques. The DDSM approach identifies the near-optimal production system configurations that meet the new customer demand using an iterative design process across two distinct levels, namely the workstation and system levels. At the workstation level, a set of potential workstation configurations are identified by utilising the knowledge mapping between product, process, resource and resource attribute domains. Workstation design data of selected configurations are streamlined into a common data model that is accessed at the system level where DES software and a multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (GA) are used to support decision-making activities by identifying potential system configurations that provide optimum scale-up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For the optimisation study, two conflicting objectives: scale-up cost and production throughput are considered. The approach is employed in a battery module assembly pilot line that requires structural modifications to meet the surge in the demand of electric vehicle powertrains. The pilot line is located at the Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, where the production data is captured to initiate and validate the workstation models. Conclusively, it is ascertained by experts that the approach is found useful to support the selection of suitable system configuration and design with significant savings in time, cost and effort.     

Benchmarking performance of machine and deep learning-based methodologies for Urdu text document classification

Neural Computing and Applications - In order to provide benchmark performance for Urdu text document classification, the contribution of this paper is manifold. First, it provides a publicly...     

Spatial bound whale optimization algorithm: an efficient high-dimensional feature selection approach

Neural Computing and Applications - Selecting a subset of candidate features is one of the important steps in the data mining process. The ultimate goal of feature selection is to select an optimal...     

EEG extended source imaging with structured sparsity and $$L_1$$ -norm residual

Neural Computing and Applications - It is a long-standing challenge to reconstruct the locations and extents of cortical neural activities from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, especially...     

高速加工中心主轴系统动力学建模及优化设计

建立了DMU-70V五轴数控高速加工中心主轴-夹具-刀具系统的有限元模型，并利用动态测试的方法对有限元计算结果进行验证；以提高低阶固有频率作为动态优化目标函数，对主轴系统进行了优化设计。