Copyright Protection of Color Imaging Using Robust-Encoded Watermarking

In this paper we present a robust-encoded watermarking method applied to color images for copyright protection, which presents robustness against several geometric and signal processing distortions. Trade-off between payload, robustness and imperceptibility is a very important aspect which has to be considered when a watermark algorithm is designed. In our proposed scheme, previously to be embedded into the image, the watermark signal is encoded using a convolutional encoder, which can perform forward error correction achieving better robustness performance. Then, the embedding process is carried out through the discrete cosine transform domain (DCT) of an image using the image normalization technique to accomplish robustness against geometric and signal processing distortions. The embedded watermark coded bits are extracted and decoded using the Viterbi algorithm. In order to determine the presence or absence of the watermark into the image we compute the bit error rate (BER) between the recovered and the original watermark data sequence. The quality of the watermarked image is measured using the well-known indices: Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The color difference between the watermarked and original images is obtained by using the Normalized Color Difference (NCD) measure. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides good performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison among the proposed and previously reported methods based on different techniques is also provided

Sri Lanka Country Profile

[From Introduction] This country study for Sri Lanka is part of the ILO project \u27Employment of People with Disabilities – the Impact of Legislation\u27 which aims to enhance the capacity of national governments in selected countries of Asia and East Africa to implement effective legislation concerning the employment of people with disabilities. Starting with a systematic examination of laws in place to promote employment and training opportunities for people with disabilities in selected countries of Asia and the Pacific (Australia, Cambodia, China, Fiji, Japan, India, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Thailand), the project sets out to examine the operation of such legislation, identify the implementation mechanisms in place and suggest improvements Technical assistance is provided to selected national governments in implementing necessary improvements. The country study outlines the main provisions of the laws in place in Sri Lanka concerning the employment of people with disabilities. A brief review of the implementation of the legislation is also provided, insofar as this was possible, based on a survey of documentary sources, a study by an in-country consultant and feedback from Sri Lankan delegates to a Project Consultation held in Bangkok, 17 January 2003. It may be read in conjunction with the regional overview prepared for this Consultation \u27Employment of People with Disabilities– the Impact of Legislation (Asia and the Pacific). Project Consultation Report, Bangkok 17 January\u27, ILO 2003

Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors

This is an essay about law in cyberspace. I focus on three interdependent phenomena: a set of political and legal assumptions that I call the jurisprudence of digital libertarianism, a separate but related set of beliefs about the state\u27s supposed inability to regulate the Internet, and a preference for technological solutions to hard legal issues on-line. I make the familiar criticism that digital libertarianism is inadequate because of its blindness towards the effects of private power, and the less familiar claim that digital libertarianism is also surprisingly blind to the state\u27s own power in cyberspace. In fact, I argue that the conceptual structure and jurisprudential assumptions of digital libertarianism lead its practitioners to ignore the ways in which the state can often use privatized enforcement and state-backed technologies to evade some of the supposed practical (and constitutional) restraints on the exercise of legal power over the Net. Finally, I argue that technological solutions which provide the keys to the first two phenomena are neither as neutral nor as benign as they are currently perceived to be. Some of my illustrations will come from the current Administration proposals for Internet copyright regulation, others from the Communications Decency Act and the cryptography debate. In the process, I make opportunistic and unsystematic use of the late Michel Foucault\u27s work to criticise some the jurisprudential orthodoxy of the Net

Intellectual Property’s Leviathan

Neoliberalism is a complex, multifaceted concept. As such, it offers many possible points of entry into my primary field of study, that of intellectual property (IP) law. We might begin by investigating tensions between IP law and a purely economic conception of neoliberalism, for example. Or we might consider whether or how IP law might be “insulated from democratic governance” while also being rapidly assembled. In these few pages, I want to focus instead on a different line of inquiry, one that reveals the powerful grip that one particular neoliberal conception has on our contemporary imaginary: the neoliberal conception of the state. Today, both those who defend robust private IP law and their most prominent critics, I will show, typically describe the state in its first instance as inertial, heavy, bureaucratic, ill-informed, and perilously corruptible and corrupt

Deceptive Practices 2.0: Legal and Policy Responses

Reviews recent online misinformation campaigns and "cyberfraud" to suppress voting and skew elections, mainly in minority communities. Examines whether federal and state laws can sufficiently deter and punish perpetrators. Makes policy recommendations

Camera-based Image Forgery Localization using Convolutional Neural Networks

Camera fingerprints are precious tools for a number of image forensics tasks. A well-known example is the photo response non-uniformity (PRNU) noise pattern, a powerful device fingerprint. Here, to address the image forgery localization problem, we rely on noiseprint, a recently proposed CNN-based camera model fingerprint. The CNN is trained to minimize the distance between same-model patches, and maximize the distance otherwise. As a result, the noiseprint accounts for model-related artifacts just like the PRNU accounts for device-related non-uniformities. However, unlike the PRNU, it is only mildly affected by residuals of high-level scene content. The experiments show that the proposed noiseprint-based forgery localization method improves over the PRNU-based reference