Savoir faire et faire savoir: what I learned about innovation while I thought I was doing a Ph.D.

This short text is a reflection of lessons learned about innovation during my studies at the signal processing laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, while I thought I was studying video segmentation based on multiple features for interactive multimedia applications.     

A self-immune to 3D masks attacks face recognition system

Due to their advantages, facial recognition systems are among the most widely used biometric systems in recent years. However, their drawback is that they can easily be deceived by using 3D masks, which are replicas of real faces. To confirm this fact, we have tested the vulnerability to 3D masks attacks of the already approved Legendre moments invariants (LMI)-based face recognition method. This has been achieved by using the 3D mask attack database (3DMAD), which consists of real faces and faces with 3D masks. The obtained spoof false acceptance rate (SFAR) was close to 65%, which proves that this recognition system is vulnerable to 3D masks attacks. This is generally the case of other face recognition systems, with no anti-spoofing provision. In this paper, a face recognition method is proposed to prevent hackers from deceiving face recognition systems by using 3D masks of people belonging to the system database. This method combines the LMI and the linear discriminant analysis for characteristic features extraction, and the maximum likelihood for classification. With a 97.6% recognition rate and a SFAR equal to 0.83%, the results obtained may be considered as very satisfactory. These results, while obtained with a lower computational time, compare favorably with those of the state-of-the-art method that uses the same 3DMAD database.     

Optical waveguides in fluoride lead silicate glasses fabricated by carbon ion implantation

The carbon ion implantation with energy of 4.0 MeV and a dose of 4.0×1014 ions/cm2 is employed for fabricating the optical waveguide in fluoride lead silicate glasses. The optical modes as well as the effective refractive indices are measured by the prism coupling method. The refractive index distribution in the fluoride lead silicate glass waveguide is simulated by the reflectivity calculation method (RCM). The light intensity profile and the energy losses are calculated by the ?nite-difference beam propagation method (FD-BPM) and the program of stopping and range of ions in matter (SRIM), respectively. The propagation properties indicate that the C2+ ion-implanted fluoride lead silicate glass waveguide is a candidate for fabricating optical devices.     

Completeness for Symmetric Two-Party Functionalities: Revisited

Understanding the minimal assumptions required for carrying out cryptographic tasks is one of the fundamental goals of theoretic cryptography. A rich body of work has been dedicated to understanding the complexity of cryptographic tasks in the context of (semi-honest) secure two-party computation. Much of this work has focused on the characterization of trivial and complete functionalities (resp., functionalities that can be securely implemented unconditionally, and functionalities that can be used to securely compute all functionalities). Most previous works define reductions via an ideal implementation of the functionality; i.e., f reduces to g if one can implement f using a black-box (or oracle) that computes the function g and returns the output to both parties. Such a reduction models the computation of f as an atomic operation. However, in the real world, protocols proceed in rounds, and the output is not learned by the parties simultaneously. In this paper, we show that this distinction is significant. Specifically, we show that there exist symmetric functionalities (where both parties receive the same outcome) that are neither trivial nor complete under “black-box reductions,” and yet the existence of a constant-round protocol for securely computing such a functionality implies infinitely often oblivious transfer (meaning that it is secure for infinitely many values of the security parameter). In light of the above, we propose an alternative definitional infrastructure for studying the triviality and completeness of functionalities.     

A novel proposal for all-optical Galois field adder based on photonic crystals

In this paper we are going to propose an all-optical structure for implementing Galois field adder. To do so, we will use four optical XOR gates. The working principle of the proposed structure is based on destructive interference of optical waves. By choosing different lengths for the input waveguides, 180\(^\circ \) of phase difference will be generated between the optical waves. In the final structure, the normalized power for logic 0 and 1 at the output ports was 1 and 45%. Time delay of the proposed structure is about 1.5 ps.     

高精度平面绝对标定

在高精度面形检测中,绝对标定是提高检测精度的重要方法。但在平面绝对标定中,无论是经典的三平板绝对检测还是旋转平移绝对检测都无法对平面的power项进行绝对标定。而利用液面进行绝对标定虽然可以给出完整的平面标定,但是液面易受环境影响,重复性难以提高,因此标定精度往往不高。针对这一难题,利用Fizeau干涉仪,采用液面方法对平面的power项单独进行绝对标定,结合旋转平移绝对标定方法对平面其他Zernike项进行标定,从而得到了完整的高精度的平面绝对标定。不仅提高了检测精度,也对平面进行了完整的高精度标定,大大提高了干涉仪的检测精度。     

DTN routing using explicit and probabilistic routing table states

Routing in communication networks involves the indirection from a persistent name (ID) to a locator. The locator specifies how packets are delivered to a destination with a particular ID. Such a mapping is provided by a routing table entry, i.e. state. In a DTN, it is hard to maintain routing state because intermittent connectivity prevents protocols from refreshing states when they become inaccurate. In prior work, per-destination state mostly corresponds to utilities, where a high utility value about a destination implies that the probability to encounter the destination for the node maintaining the state is high. This approach depends on a particular mobility pattern in which nodes that met frequently in the past are likely to encounter in the future. In this paper, we use the concept of weak state that does not rely on external messages to remain valid (Acer et al. in MobiCom ’07: proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on mobile computing and networking, pp 290–301, 2007). Our weak state realization provides probabilistic yet explicit information about where the destination is located. We build Weak State Routing protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks (WSR-D) that exploits the direction of node mobility in forwarding. It provides an osmosis mechanism to disseminate the state information to the network. With osmosis, a node has consistent information about a portion of the nodes that are located in regions relevant to its direction of mobility. Through simulations, we show that WSR-D achieves a higher delivery ratio with smaller average delay, and reduces the number of message transfers in comparison to Spray & Wait (Spyropoulos et al. in Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2005 workshops: conference on computer communications, pp 252–259, 2005) and Spray & Focus (Spyropoulos et al. in IEEE/ACM Trans Netw, 16(1):77–90, 2008), a stateless and a utility based protocol, respectively.     

Cooperative Diversity Based Multi-Carrier CDMA System with Decode and Forward Relays in Rayleigh Fading channels

Cooperative communication is one of the major diversity techniques which exploit spatial diversity through a virtual antenna array. In addition to cooperation, transmitting the same symbols through different sub carriers (Multi-Carriers) introduces frequency diversity as well. The objective of this paper is to investigate cooperative diversity performance in Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) systems with orthogonal and non-orthogonal spreading codes. We evaluate the Symbol Error Rate (SER) of cooperative transmission in frequency-selective Rayleigh faded uplink channel. We focus on the use of despreading-combining (DC) receiver and coherent detection with Maximal Ratio Combining for the above selected criteria respectively. It is shown that the orthogonal spreading code cancels Multiple-Access Interference (MAI) and the performance is completely independent of the length of the spreading code. The approximate SER derived here for the the transmission scheme is well matched with the increasing number of users in the system. Hence the Gaussian approximation is acceptable for systems which are operating with their maximum user capacities at lower SNR values.     

一种大尺度二维直线度精密测量的新方法

本文提出了一种远距离、大范围二维直线度测量的新方法．该方法采用特殊设计的十字线准直激光器及线阵CCD，通过特殊的光学系统结构设计，能在0-20m距离内连续测量，直线度范围可达70mm，精度优于0．1mm，实际测量结果表明，该方法可适应野外作业环境。     

Nitride-Based ultraviolet metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors with a low-temperature GaN layer

The GaN metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) ultraviolet (UV) photodetectors with a low-temperature (LT)-GaN layer have been demonstrated. It was found that we could achieve a two orders of magnitude smaller, photodetector-dark current by introducing a LT-GaN layer, which could be attributed to the larger Schottky-barrier height between the Ni/Au metal contact and the LT-GaN layer. It was also found that photodetectors with the LT-GaN layer could provide a larger photocurrent to dark-current contrast ratio and a larger UV-to-visible rejection ratio. The maximum responsivity was found to be 3.3 A/W and 0.13 A/W when the photodetector with a LT-GaN layer was biased at 5 V and 1 V, respectively.