Digital Video Watermarking Robust Against Camcorder Recording Based on DWT-SVD

In order to reduce the block effects in the dark regions and improve the flicker in the bright regions of the existing video watermark algorithms, we propose an improved video watermarking algorithm against camcorder recording based on DWT-SVD. In proposed algorithm, 3th level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is applied to Y luminance of every single frame, and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used on sub-band of DWT. Watermark sequence is embedded by fine-tuning the singular value of consecutive frames. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust against many different attacks such as geometric attack, signal processing and camcorder recording. Moreover, the proposed scheme can reduce the blocks effect and improve the flicker by embedding watermark into edge feature of video frame. Although, the method can provide high video quality than the existing schemes, however, it is not robust to strong compression such as MPEG

Trimetallic nanoparticles in anaerobic digestion process for biogas production

Nanoparticles (NPs) have emerged as an amazing class of materials with a broad spectrum of examples with at least one dimension in the range of 1 to 100 nm. Metallic NPs can be produced with outstanding magnetic, electrical, optical, mechanical, and catalytic properties that are substantially different from their bulk counterparts. Nowadays, NPs are used in the anaerobic digestion (AD) process for enhancing biogas yield. However, NPs activity and electron exchange capacity depend on their interaction and inhibition effects on microbes in the AD process. Currently, to increase NPs activity and functionality, various organic and inorganic synthesis methods have been applied for the last two decades. In the same way, the co-precipitation method was used to prepare less hazardous, highly active NPs for microbes-to-microbes interaction compared to other methods. The present study focused on the trimetallic nanoparticles (TMNPs) made of iron (Fe), nickel (Ni), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu) and cobalt (Co) are considered the most effective materials for biomass conversion through the AD process. This study used palm oil mill effluent (POME) as biomass, and different concentrations of active TMNPs were used for biogas production. Fe-Ni-Zn, Fe-Co-Cu and Fe-Co-Zn TMNPs interact with microbes and help to degrade biomass under anaerobic conditions. At 10 mg/L, 20 mg/L, 30 mg/L, 40 mg/L and 50 mg/L TMNPs and POME-based mesophilic (37±1°C) AD was investigated for biogas production. Secondly, 20 mg/L Fe-Co-Zn TMNPs at pH 7.0 increased biogas production by 60.11% compared to the control AD. This work aims to determine ideal conditions for higher biogas with lesser TMNPs using response surface methodology (RSM). As a result, the mesophilic condition (250C -350C) of the POME-based AD process increased by 85% biogas production compared to the blank AD process (p < 0.05). However, The AD process has some limitations (TMNPs toxicity, antibacterial effects, less microbes interaction) and needs to focus on organic waste-to-energy production. Nevertheless, the biogas yield increased to 85% from moderate AD conditions with minimal Fe-Co-Zn TMNPs addition. Finally, other future perspectives worth investigating are reported to understand the microbial interaction and toxicity of TMNPs in deep for higher biogas production with lesser TMNPs concentration

Energy efficient hardware acceleration of multimedia processing tools

The world of mobile devices is experiencing an ongoing trend of feature enhancement and generalpurpose multimedia platform convergence. This trend poses many grand challenges, the most pressing being their limited battery life as a consequence of delivering computationally demanding features. The envisaged mobile application features can be considered to be accelerated by a set of underpinning hardware blocks Based on the survey that this thesis presents on modem video compression standards and their associated enabling technologies, it is concluded that tight energy and throughput constraints can still be effectively tackled at algorithmic level in order to design re-usable optimised hardware acceleration cores. To prove these conclusions, the work m this thesis is focused on two of the basic enabling technologies that support mobile video applications, namely the Shape Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform (SA-DCT) and its inverse, the SA-IDCT. The hardware architectures presented in this work have been designed with energy efficiency in mind. This goal is achieved by employing high level techniques such as redundant computation elimination, parallelism and low switching computation structures. Both architectures compare favourably against the relevant pnor art in the literature. The SA-DCT/IDCT technologies are instances of a more general computation - namely, both are Constant Matrix Multiplication (CMM) operations. Thus, this thesis also proposes an algorithm for the efficient hardware design of any general CMM-based enabling technology. The proposed algorithm leverages the effective solution search capability of genetic programming. A bonus feature of the proposed modelling approach is that it is further amenable to hardware acceleration. Another bonus feature is an early exit mechanism that achieves large search space reductions .Results show an improvement on state of the art algorithms with future potential for even greater savings