Copyright protection of scalar and multimedia sensor network data using digital watermarking

This thesis records the research on watermarking techniques to address the issue of copyright protection of the scalar data in WSNs and image data in WMSNs, in order to ensure that the proprietary information remains safe between the sensor nodes in both. The first objective is to develop LKR watermarking technique for the copyright protection of scalar data in WSNs. The second objective is to develop GPKR watermarking technique for copyright protection of image data in WMSN

Protection of Records and Data Authentication based on Secret Shares and Watermarking

The rapid growth in communication technology facilitates the health industry in many aspects from transmission of sensor’s data to real-time diagnosis using cloud-based frameworks. However, the secure transmission of data and its authenticity become a challenging task, especially, for health-related applications. The medical information must be accessible to only the relevant healthcare staff to avoid any unfortunate circumstances for the patient as well as for the healthcare providers. Therefore, a method to protect the identity of a patient and authentication of transmitted data is proposed in this study. The proposed method provides dual protection. First, it encrypts the identity using Shamir’s secret sharing scheme without the increase in dimension of the original identity. Second, the identity is watermarked using zero-watermarking to avoid any distortion into the host signal. The experimental results show that the proposed method encrypts, embeds and extracts identities reliably. Moreover, in case of malicious attack, the method distorts the embedded identity which provides a clear indication of fabrication. An automatic disorder detection system using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and Gaussian mixture model is also implemented which concludes that malicious attacks greatly impact on the accurate diagnosis of disorders

Using Quaternion Fourier Transform in Steganography Systems

steganography is the discipline of exchanging information messages in such way that no one, other than the intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message.  The transmitted message can be in textual or multimedia form (audio, image or video) and can be hidden within cover media. Moreover, the hidden message can be in either plain or cipher form.  In steganography, the majority of hiding techniques are implemented either in spatial domain or in frequency domain of the cover media.   The current contribution introduces a new a steganography technique for hiding a textual message within a cover image.   Both the message and the cover image is converted to quaternion form and then only the quaternion message is converted to the frequency domain using Quaternion Fast Fourier Discrete Transform (QFFDT) technique.  Simple quaternion mathematics are used to combine the message (in quaternion frequency domain) within the cover image (in quaternion form).  Conversely, the hidden message can be revealed at the receiver using simple quaternion mathematics in presence of the original cover image.  The proposed method allows hiding a huge amount of data and it is much complicated against steganalysis compared to the traditional methods. The method is assessed using the known performance metrics and the obtained results show that it is robust and more secure against steganalysis attacks without affecting the consumed bandwidth of the communication channel

Multibiometric security in wireless communication systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 05/08/2010.This thesis has aimed to explore an application of Multibiometrics to secured wireless communications. The medium of study for this purpose included Wi-Fi, 3G, and WiMAX, over which simulations and experimental studies were carried out to assess the performance. In specific, restriction of access to authorized users only is provided by a technique referred to hereafter as multibiometric cryptosystem. In brief, the system is built upon a complete challenge/response methodology in order to obtain a high level of security on the basis of user identification by fingerprint and further confirmation by verification of the user through text-dependent speaker recognition. First is the enrolment phase by which the database of watermarked fingerprints with memorable texts along with the voice features, based on the same texts, is created by sending them to the server through wireless channel. Later is the verification stage at which claimed users, ones who claim are genuine, are verified against the database, and it consists of five steps. Initially faced by the identification level, one is asked to first present one’s fingerprint and a memorable word, former is watermarked into latter, in order for system to authenticate the fingerprint and verify the validity of it by retrieving the challenge for accepted user. The following three steps then involve speaker recognition including the user responding to the challenge by text-dependent voice, server authenticating the response, and finally server accepting/rejecting the user. In order to implement fingerprint watermarking, i.e. incorporating the memorable word as a watermark message into the fingerprint image, an algorithm of five steps has been developed. The first three novel steps having to do with the fingerprint image enhancement (CLAHE with 'Clip Limit', standard deviation analysis and sliding neighborhood) have been followed with further two steps for embedding, and extracting the watermark into the enhanced fingerprint image utilising Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). In the speaker recognition stage, the limitations of this technique in wireless communication have been addressed by sending voice feature (cepstral coefficients) instead of raw sample. This scheme is to reap the advantages of reducing the transmission time and dependency of the data on communication channel, together with no loss of packet. Finally, the obtained results have verified the claims

Recent Trends in Communication Networks

In recent years there has been many developments in communication technology. This has greatly enhanced the computing power of small handheld resource-constrained mobile devices. Different generations of communication technology have evolved. This had led to new research for communication of large volumes of data in different transmission media and the design of different communication protocols. Another direction of research concerns the secure and error-free communication between the sender and receiver despite the risk of the presence of an eavesdropper. For the communication requirement of a huge amount of multimedia streaming data, a lot of research has been carried out in the design of proper overlay networks. The book addresses new research techniques that have evolved to handle these challenges

An Investigation of Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplexing Techniques as an Alternative to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Transmissions and Comparison of Wavelet Families and Their Children

Recently, issues surrounding wireless communications have risen to prominence because of the increase in the popularity of wireless applications. Bandwidth problems, and the difficulty of modulating signals across carriers, represent significant challenges. Every modulation scheme used to date has had limitations, and the use of the Discrete Fourier Transform in OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) is no exception. The restriction on further development of OFDM lies primarily within the type of transform it uses in the heart of its system, Fourier transform. OFDM suffers from sensitivity to Peak to Average Power Ratio, carrier frequency offset and wasting some bandwidth to guard successive OFDM symbols. The discovery of the wavelet transform has opened up a number of potential applications from image compression to watermarking and encryption. Very recently, work has been done to investigate the potential of using wavelet transforms within the communication space. This research will further investigate a recently proposed, innovative, modulation technique, Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplex, which utilises the wavelet transform opening a new avenue for an alternative modulation scheme with some interesting potential characteristics. Wavelet transform has many families and each of those families has children which each differ in filter length. This research consider comprehensively investigates the new modulation scheme, and proposes multi-level dynamic sub-banding as a tool to adapt variable signal bandwidths. Furthermore, all compactly supported wavelet families and their associated children of those families are investigated and evaluated against each other and compared with OFDM. The linear computational complexity of wavelet transform is less than the logarithmic complexity of Fourier in OFDM. The more important complexity is the operational complexity which is cost effectiveness, such as the time response of the system, the memory consumption and the number of iterative operations required for data processing. Those complexities are investigated for all available compactly supported wavelet families and their children and compared with OFDM. The evaluation reveals which wavelet families perform more effectively than OFDM, and for each wavelet family identifies which family children perform the best. Based on these results, it is concluded that the wavelet modulation scheme has some interesting advantages over OFDM, such as lower complexity and bandwidth conservation of up to 25%, due to the elimination of guard intervals and dynamic bandwidth allocation, which result in better cost effectiveness

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

QUALITY-DRIVEN CROSS LAYER DESIGN FOR MULTIMEDIA SECURITY OVER RESOURCE CONSTRAINED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

The strong need for security guarantee, e.g., integrity and authenticity, as well as privacy and confidentiality in wireless multimedia services has driven the development of an emerging research area in low cost Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Unfortunately, those conventional encryption and authentication techniques cannot be applied directly to WMSNs due to inborn challenges such as extremely limited energy, computing and bandwidth resources. This dissertation provides a quality-driven security design and resource allocation framework for WMSNs. The contribution of this dissertation bridges the inter-disciplinary research gap between high layer multimedia signal processing and low layer computer networking. It formulates the generic problem of quality-driven multimedia resource allocation in WMSNs and proposes a cross layer solution. The fundamental methodologies of multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication, and their application to digital image or video compression standards are presented. New multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication schemes are proposed at application layer, which significantly reduces encryption/authentication complexity. In addition, network resource allocation methodologies at low layers are extensively studied. An unequal error protection-based network resource allocation scheme is proposed to achieve the best effort media quality with integrity and energy efficiency guarantee. Performance evaluation results show that this cross layer framework achieves considerable energy-quality-security gain by jointly designing multimedia selective encryption/multimedia stream authentication and communication resource allocation

Preserving data integrity of encoded medical images: the LAR compression framework

International audienceThrough the development of medical imaging systems and their integration into a complete information system, the need for advanced joint coding and network services becomes predominant. PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) aims to acquire, store and compress, retrieve, present and distribute medical images. These systems have to be accessible via the Internet or wireless channels. Thus protection processes against transmission errors have to be added to get a powerful joint source-channel coding tool. Moreover, these sensitive data require confidentiality and privacy for both archiving and transmission purposes, leading to use cryptography and data embedding solutions. This chapter introduces data integrity protection and developed dedicated tools of content protection and secure bitstream transmission for medical encoded image purposes. In particular, the LAR image coding method is defined together with advanced securization services