A dynamic video watermarking algorithm in fast motion areas in the wavelet domain

In this paper, we propose a video watermarking algorithm which embeds different parts of a single watermark into different shots of a video under the wavelet domain. Based on a Motion Activity Analysis, different regions of the original video are separated into perceptually distinct categories according to motion information and region complexity. Thus, the localizations of the watermark are adjusted adaptively in accordance with the human visual system and signal characteristics, which makes them perceptually invisible and less vulnerable to automated removal. In addition, contrary to traditional methods where the watermark remains at a fixed position on the screen, the watermark moves along with moving objects and thus motion artefacts can be avoid. The multi-frame based extraction strategy ensures that the watermark can be correctly recovered from a very short segment of video. Individual frames extracted from the video also contain watermark information. Experimental results show that the inserted watermark is not only less perceptible but also robust against common video processing attacks.     

Quasi-Monte Carlo methods for Markov chains with continuous multi-dimensional state space

We describe a quasi-Monte Carlo method for the simulation of discrete time Markov chains with continuous multi-dimensional state space. The method simulates copies of the chain in parallel. At each step the copies are reordered according to their successive coordinates. We prove the convergence of the method when the number of copies increases. We illustrate the method with numerical examples where the simulation accuracy is improved by large factors compared with Monte Carlo simulation.     

Editors’ note

Editorial Note

Editors’ note     

Haar invariant signatures and spatial recognition using omnidirectional visual information only

This paper describes a method for spatial representation, place recognition and qualitative self-localization in dynamic indoor environments, based on omnidirectional images. This is a difficult problem because of the perceptual ambiguity of the acquired images, and their weak robustness to noise, geometrical and photometric variations of real world scenes. The spatial representation is built up invariant signatures using Invariance Theory where we suggest to adapt Haar invariant integrals to the particular geometry and image transformations of catadioptric omnidirectional sensors. It follows that combining simple image features in a process of integration over visual transformations and robot motion, can build discriminant percepts about robot spatial locations. We further analyze the invariance properties of the signatures and the apparent relation between their similarity measures and metric distances. The invariance properties of the signatures can be adapted to infer a hierarchical process, from global room recognition to local and coarse robot localization.     

Collaborative user modeling with user-generated tags for social recommender systems

With the popularity of social media services, the sheer amount of content is increasing exponentially on the Social Web that leads to attract considerable attention to recommender systems. Recommender systems provide users with recommendations of items suited to their needs. To provide proper recommendations to users, recommender systems require an accurate user model that can reflect a user’s characteristics, preferences and needs. In this study, by leveraging user-generated tags as preference indicators, we propose a new collaborative approach to user modeling that can be exploited to recommender systems. Our approach first discovers relevant and irrelevant topics for users, and then enriches an individual user model with collaboration from other similar users. In order to evaluate the performance of our model, we compare experimental results with a user model based on collaborative filtering approaches and a vector space model. The experimental results have shown the proposed model provides a better representation in user interests and achieves better recommendation results in terms of accuracy and ranking.     

Disassembly Sequencing Using Tabu Search

End-of-life disassembly has developed into a major research area within the sustainability paradigm, resulting in the emergence of several algorithms and structures proposing heuristics techniques such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Neural Networks (NN). The performance of the proposed methodologies heavily depends on the accuracy and the flexibility of the algorithms to accommodate several factors such as preserving the precedence relationships during disassembly while obtaining near- optimal and optimal solutions. This paper improves a previously proposed Genetic Algorithm model for disassembly sequencing by utilizing a faster metaheuristic algorithm, Tabu search, to obtain the optimal solution. The objectives of the proposed algorithm are to minimize (1) the traveled distance by the robotic arm, (2) the number of disassembly method changes, and (3) the number of robotic arm travels by combining the identical-material components together and hence eliminating unnecessary disassembly operations. In addition to improving the quality of optimum sequence generation, a comprehensive statistical analysis comparing the previous Genetic Algorithm and the proposed Tabu Search Algorithm is also included     

Analysis and forecasting of IPO underpricing

Probability of withdrawal is a feature of initial public offering (IPOs), which can be an important parameter in decisions of investors and issuers. Considering the probability of offering withdrawal facilitates more precise estimation of underpricing. In this paper, the effective factors on probability of IPO withdrawal and underpricing in Tehran Stock Exchange have been characterized using regression, and then neural network is applied to estimate the probability of IPO withdrawal and underpricing. To evaluate the performance of our applied method, fuzzy regression is employed and compared with neural network. According to the obtained empirical results, neural network demonstrates better accuracy than fuzzy regression. The results indicate that there is a meaningful relationship between underpricing and probability of withdrawal, and the probability of IPO withdrawal plays an important role in precise evaluation of underpricing.     

A two-stage gene selection scheme utilizing MRMR filter and GA wrapper

Gene expression data usually contain a large number of genes, but a small number of samples. Feature selection for gene expression data aims at finding a set of genes that best discriminates biological samples of different types. In this paper, we propose a two-stage selection algorithm for genomic data by combining MRMR (Minimum Redundancy–Maximum Relevance) and GA (Genetic Algorithm). In the first stage, MRMR is used to filter noisy and redundant genes in high-dimensional microarray data. In the second stage, the GA uses the classifier accuracy as a fitness function to select the highly discriminating genes. The proposed method is tested for tumor classification on five open datasets: NCI, Lymphoma, Lung, Leukemia and Colon using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naïve Bayes (NB) classifiers. The comparison of the MRMR-GA with MRMR filter and GA wrapper shows that our method is able to find the smallest gene subset that gives the most classification accuracy in leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV).