Efficient hardware architecture of 2D-scan-based wavelet watermarking for image and video

This paper describes an efficient hardware architecture of 2D-Scan-based-Wavelet watermarking for image and video. The potential application for this architecture includes broadcast monitoring of video sequences for High Definition Television (HDTV) and DVD protection and access control. The proposed 2D design allows even distribution of the processing load onto a set of filters, with each set performing the calculation for one dimension according to the scan-based process. The video protection is achieved by the insertion of watermarks bank within the middle frequency of wavelet coefficients related to video frames by their selective quantization. The 2-D DWT is applied for both video stream and watermark in order to make the watermarking scheme robust and perceptually invisible. The proposed architecture has a very simple control part, since the data are operated in a row-column-slice fashion. This organization reduces the requirement of on-chip memory. In addition, the control unit selects which coefficient to pass to the low-pass and high-pass filters. The on-chip memory will be small as compared to the input size since it depends solely on the filter sizes. Due to the pipelining, all filters are utilized for 100% of the time except during the start-up and wind-down times. The major contribution of this research is towards the selection of appropriate real time watermarking scheme and performing a trade-off between the algorithmic aspects of our proposed watermarking scheme and the hardware implementation technique. The hardware architecture is designed, as a watermarking based IP core with the Avalon interface related to NIOS embedded processor, and tested in order to evaluate the performance of our proposed watermarking algorithm. This architecture has been implemented on the Altera Stratix-II Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) prototyping board. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the capability of the proposed watermarking system for real time applications and its robustness against malicious attacks.     

Electrochemical degradation of waters containing O-Toluidine on PbO2 and BDD anodes

Electrochemical oxidation of O-Toluidine (OT) was studied by galvanostatic electrolysis using lead dioxide (PbO₂) and boron-doped diamond (BDD) as anodes. The influence of operating parameters, such as current density, initial concentration of OT and temperature was investigated. Measurements of chemical oxygen demand were used to follow the oxidation. The experimental data indicated that on PbO₂ and BDD anodes, OT oxidation takes place by reaction with electrogenerated hydroxyl radicals and is favoured by low current density and high temperature. Furthermore, BDD anodes offer significant advantages over PbO₂ in terms of current efficiency and oxidation rate.     

Kinetics and thermal characterization of thermoset cure

The differential scanning calorimeter (Perkin-Elmer DSC-1) is used to characterize the cure of a general-purpose polyester during isothermal and scanning experiments. The technique is based on a new proposed model for the kinetics of isothermal cure. The model yields results which are in good agreement with experimental isothermal rate of reaction and integral heat of reaction data. It also gives some information about the residual reactivity of the sample after an isothermal cure experiment. With the aid of the proposed kinetic model, it is possible to obtain integral heats of reaction and rates of heat generation at different temperatures during a scanning experiment. The difference between the rate of heat input to the sample and the heat of reaction at any instant during scanning may be used to calculate the specific heat of the sample at the same instant. Specific heat data show two maxima during each scanning experiment. These maxima may be associated with transitions occurring during cure in the melt and rubbery states.     

Path diversity for FFH/PSK spread-spectrum communication systems

A fast frequency hopping (FFH) method which uses path-diversity combining is proposed. Diversity techniques are realized when a signal is received from diverse independent paths, each of which carries identical information but suffers from independent fading variations. The improvement of communication performance of FFH systems is possible as the delayed paths are used and path-diversity combination is realized. The advantages of this method, operating in Rayleigh fading channels are confirmed by theoretical analyses. The improvement is in order of 2~3 dB at bit error rate (BER) of 10^-3. This method can be also effective against interferences from other users in a code division multiple access (CDMA) environment. The performance of this system in a CDMA environment is evaluated by theoretical analyses and is shown to be superior to non-combining method. At BER of 10^-3 the required E_b/N₀ of the proposed system is 5 dB lower. If E_b/N_o is fixed, a greater number of users can be accommodated using the proposed system     

Time slot assignment techniques for TDMA digital cellular systems

In TDMA system each channel may have more than one time slot to serve more than one user. Techniques for the assignment of time slots to users while minimizing co-channel interference are important. The paper presents six time slot assignment techniques. A discrete event stochastic simulation study was performed on 120° and 60° sectored systems. The simulation employs the “blocked calls cleared” traffic model and a log-linear path loss propagation model. Only the down link is considered. The results compare the performance of the six techniques and investigates the effect of the number of time slots per frame and the maximum acceptable interference level     

A novel biometric system for signature verification based on score level fusion approach

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The active modality of handwriting is broadly related to signature verification in the context of biometric user authentication systems. Signature verification...     

Survey of ICIC techniques in LTE networks under various mobile environment parameters

LTE networks’ main challenge is to efficiently use the available spectrum, and to provide satisfying quality of service for mobile users. However, using the same bandwidth among adjacent cells leads to occurrence of Inter-cell Interference especially at the cell-edge. Basic interference mitigation approaches consider bandwidth partitioning techniques between adjacent cells, such as frequency reuse of factor m schemes, to minimize cell-edge interference. Although SINR values are improved, such techniques lead to significant reduction in the maximum achievable data rate. Several improvements have been proposed to enhance the performance of frequency reuse schemes, where restrictions are made on resource blocks usage, power allocation, or both. Nevertheless, bandwidth partitioning methods still affect the maximum achievable throughput. In this proposal, we intend to perform a comprehensive survey on Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) techniques, and we study their performance while putting into consideration various design parameters. This study is implemented throughout intensive system level simulations under several parameters such as different network loads, radio conditions, and user distributions. Simulation results show the advantages and the limitations of each technique compared to frequency reuse-1 model. Thus, we are able to identify the most suitable ICIC technique for each network scenario.     

Performance of orthogonal multicarrier CDMA in a multipath fadingchannel

A new multicarrier direct sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) system is proposed. Transmitted data bits are serial to parallel converted to a number of parallel branches. On each branch each bit is direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DS-SS) modulated and transmitted using orthogonal carriers. This procedure provides the following advantages: the transmission bandwidth is more efficiently utilized, the effect of frequency selective multipath interference can be mitigated, and frequency/time diversity is achieved. The system is analyzed with both a conventional matched-filter (MF) receiver and a RAKE receiver for each carrier. The performance is compared to that of the conventional single carrier system with RAKE receiver. It is shown that the multicarrier system is able to out-perform the RAKE receiver when the system parameters are selected properly     

Re-ranking Person Re-identification using Attributes Learning

Neural Computing and Applications - Person re-identification (Re-ID) across multi-camera views remains a very challenging task. In fact, the use of global convolutional neural network (CNN)...     

Performance of multicarrier CDMA with DPSK modulation anddifferential detection in fading multipath channels

Multicarrier (MC) direct sequence (DS) code division multiple access (CDMA) with differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) modulation and differential detection is proposed. Transmitted data bits are differentially encoded after serial-to-parallel conversion to a number of parallel streams. On each branch, encoded bits are direct sequence spread spectrum (SS) modulated and transmitted using different carriers. The system is analyzed with a differential detector in static Rayleigh fading multipath channel, in fast Rayleigh fading multipath channel and for variable overlapping between carrier spectra in static fading channel. Closed-form expressions are derived for the error probability and evaluated for many cases. The performance is compared to that of a system using phase-shift keying (PSK) with conventional matched filter (CMF) coherent receiver. For static fading channel, the error probability performance of the differential detector is close to that of CMF receiver. For fast fading, the performance degrades slightly with increasing fading rate. Finally; successive carriers of the system are allowed to overlap with various overlapping percentages. The condition of a single path can be achieved by increasing both the number of carriers and the separation between successive carriers. Also, for each number of carriers, there exists an optimum overlapping percentage at which the system performance is optimized. The performance of the proposed DPSK with differential detection system is close to that of PSK with CMF receiver, but the former is simpler to implement