Enhanced halftone-based secure and improved visual cryptography scheme for colour/binary Images

Visual Cryptography (VC) is gaining attraction during the past few years to secure the visual information in the transmission network. It enables the visual data i.e. handwritten notes, photos, printed text, etc. to encrypt in such a way that their decryption can be done through the human visual framework. Hence, no computational assistance is required for the decryption of the secret images they can be seen through naked eye. In this paper, a novel enhanced halftoning-based VC scheme is proposed that works for both binary and color images. Fake share is generated by the combination of random black and white pixels. The proposed algorithm consists of 3 stages i.e., detection, encryption, and decryption. Halftoning, Encryption, (2, 2) visual cryptography and the novel idea of fake share, make it even more secure and improved. As a result, it facilitates the original restored image to the authentic user, however, the one who enters the wrong password gets the combination of fake share with any real share. Both colored and black images can be processed with minimal capacity using the proposed scheme.

     

Role of situational method engineering to improve visual information systems in agile distributed environment

Software product prone to continuous evolution due to increase in the use of technology. Therefore, more stakeholders are involved in software evolution increases the cost and complexity. This required optimization of resources and cost to handle evolution with Global Software Development (GSD) to utilize time zones efficiently. The significance challenge of GSD reports: time zone difference, geographical location, communication delays, knowledge sharing, control among stakeholders and development team. Because of these challenges, the requirements for development in GSD environment are also challenge as compared to on site development. Different requirement engineering methods have been used to improve the requirements analysis to deal with ambiguities and inconsistency in large set of requirements. The customization and tailoring of requirements according to changing project’s situations required to improve project development with reusing existing agile methods during requirement engineering phase. Moreover, complex information systems where heterogeneity is inevitable that implies the involvement of divergent stakeholders and necessitate a comprehensive framework to capture multidimensional viewpoints and fulfill aforementioned issues. Therefore, a situational multi-dimensional agile requirement engineering method has been proposed to support team and stakeholders’ viewpoints. The schema of the proposed method is based on challenges recognized by performing Literature Review. Then proposed method has been evaluated via experimental approach and statistical analysis conducted to validated reliability of data collected. This result is significant approved both practically and statistically that the proposed approach ease to use, implement, trained and increased productivity and performance. Hence, the experimental study for the evaluation of the proposed approach results concluded that, proposed approach is the important multimedia tool for supporting organization and distributed development team for information sharing, collaboration, product development.

     

Color image DNA encryption using mRNA properties and non-adjacent coupled map lattices

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for encrypting color images. The innovation in this study is the use of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) encoding to import into Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) encoding. For permutation of the plain image bits, we use Arnold’s Cat Map at the bit-level. Then, using Non-Adjacent Coupled Map Lattices (NCML), we apply diffusion operations to the permuted color channels. We also provide the upgrade of the diffusion phase with DNA encoding. In the proposed algorithm, the choices are random depending on the secret key, which is implemented using a simple logistic map. Hashing the string entered by the user, the secret key, parameters, and initial values are generated by the Double MD5 method. The results of tests and security analysis showed that the results of encryption with this scheme are effective, and the key space is large enough to withstand common attacks.

     

Simple Robust PID Tuning for Magnetic Levitation Systems Using Model-free Control and $${{\cal H}_\infty}$$ ℋ ∞ Control Strategies

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - This paper proposes two control techniques to provide robust tracking for magnetic levitation systems (MLS): model-free control (MFC) and...     

A study on melt recycling of bio-based polypropylene/thermoplastic starch compound

The compulsion to use bioplastics has increased significantly today. One of the important aspects of plastics is their recyclability. Therefore, the important question of this research is that although bio-based compounds containing starch are sensitive to thermal-mechanical recycling processes, are such products thermally recyclable? To answer the question, polypropylene (PP)/thermoplastic starch (TPS) compound granules were extruded up to five times, and in the other part, single-extruded granules were blended at different ratios with virgin granules by extrusion. In order to characterize these samples, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, rotational disc rheometry, tensile properties, and appearance evaluation were used. The results showed that it is possible to recycle PP/TPS granules up to four times repetition of the extrusion operation and the fifth repetition also showed slight changes. There was also a blend of single-extruded granules with virgin material up to a 50:50% composition without significant variation.     

An efficient and noise resistive selective image encryption scheme for gray images based on chaotic maps and DNA complementary rules

A novel image encryption algorithm in streaming mode is proposed which exhaustively employs an entire set of DNA complementary rules alongwith one dimensional chaotic maps. The proposed algorithm is highly efficient due to encrypting the subset of digital image which contains 92.125 % of information. DNA addition operation is carried out on this MSB part. The core idea of the proposed scheme is to scramble the whole image by means of piecewise linear chaotic map (PWLCM) followed by decomposition of image into most significant bits (MSB) and least significant bits (LSB). The logistic sequence is XORed with the decoded MSB and LSB parts separately and finally these two parts are combined to get the ciphered image. The parameters for PWLCM, logistic map and selection of different DNA rules for encoding and decoding of both parts of an image are derived from 128-bit MD5 hash of the plain image. Simulated experimental results in terms of quantitative and qualitative ways prove the encryption quality. Efficiency and robustness against different noises make the proposed cipher a good candidate for real time applications.     

A Comparative Study of Non-traditional Methods for Vehicle Crashworthiness and NVH Optimization

In this paper, metamodeling and five well-known metaheuristic optimization algorithms were used to reduce the weight and improve crash and NVH attributes of a vehicle simultaneously. A high-fidelity full vehicle model is used to analyze peak acceleration, intrusion and component’s internal-energy under Full-Frontal, Offset-Frontal, and Side crash scenarios as well as vehicle natural frequencies. The radial basis functions method is used to approximate the structural responses. A nonlinear surrogate-based mass minimization was formulated and solved by five different optimization algorithms under crash-vibration constraints. The performance of these algorithms is investigated and discussed.     

Robust Input Covariance Constraint Control for Uncertain Polytopic Systems

In this paper, the robust input covariance constraint (ICC) control problem with polytopic uncertainty is solved using convex optimization with linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach. The ICC control problem is an optimal control problem that optimizes the output performance subjected to multiple constraints on the input covariance matrices. This control problem has significant practical implications when hard constraints need to be satisfied on control actuators. The contribution of this paper is the characterization of the control synthesis LMIs used to solve the robust ICC control problem for polytopic uncertain systems. Both continuous‐ and discrete‐time systems are considered. Parameter‐dependent and independent Lyapunov functions have been used for robust ICC controller synthesis. Numerical design examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Scale effects in nano-channel liquid flows

Force-driven liquid argon flows both in nanoscale periodic domains and in gold nano-channels are simulated using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics to investigate the scale and wall force field effects. We examined variations in liquid density, viscosity, velocity profile, slip length, shear stress and mass flow rate in different sized periodic domains and nano-channels at a fixed thermodynamic state. In the absence of walls, liquid argon obeys Newton’s law of viscosity with the desired absolute viscosity in domains as small as 4 molecular diameters in height. Results prove that deviations from continuum solution are solely due to wall effects. Simulations in nano-channels with heights varying from 3.26 to 36 nm exhibit parabolic velocity profiles with constant slip length modeled by Navier-type slip boundary condition. Both channel averaged density and “apparent viscosity” decrease with reduced channel height, which has competing effects in determination of the mass flow rate. Density layering and wall force field induce deviations from Newton’s law of viscosity in the near-wall region, while constant “apparent viscosity” with the deformation rate from a parabolic velocity profile successfully predicts shear stress in the bulk flow region.