48 research outputs found

    AirCode: Unobtrusive Physical Tags for Digital Fabrication

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    We present AirCode, a technique that allows the user to tag physically fabricated objects with given information. An AirCode tag consists of a group of carefully designed air pockets placed beneath the object surface. These air pockets are easily produced during the fabrication process of the object, without any additional material or postprocessing. Meanwhile, the air pockets affect only the scattering light transport under the surface, and thus are hard to notice to our naked eyes. But, by using a computational imaging method, the tags become detectable. We present a tool that automates the design of air pockets for the user to encode information. AirCode system also allows the user to retrieve the information from captured images via a robust decoding algorithm. We demonstrate our tagging technique with applications for metadata embedding, robotic grasping, as well as conveying object affordances.Comment: ACM UIST 2017 Technical Paper

    Dynamic block encryption with self-authenticating key exchange

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    One of the greatest challenges facing cryptographers is the mechanism used for key exchange. When secret data is transmitted, the chances are that there may be an attacker who will try to intercept and decrypt the message. Having done so, he/she might just gain advantage over the information obtained, or attempt to tamper with the message, and thus, misguiding the recipient. Both cases are equally fatal and may cause great harm as a consequence. In cryptography, there are two commonly used methods of exchanging secret keys between parties. In the first method, symmetric cryptography, the key is sent in advance, over some secure channel, which only the intended recipient can read. The second method of key sharing is by using a public key exchange method, where each party has a private and public key, a public key is shared and a private key is kept locally. In both cases, keys are exchanged between two parties. In this thesis, we propose a method whereby the risk of exchanging keys is minimised. The key is embedded in the encrypted text using a process that we call `chirp coding', and recovered by the recipient using a process that is based on correlation. The `chirp coding parameters' are exchanged between users by employing a USB flash memory retained by each user. If the keys are compromised they are still not usable because an attacker can only have access to part of the key. Alternatively, the software can be configured to operate in a one time parameter mode, in this mode, the parameters are agreed upon in advance. There is no parameter exchange during file transmission, except, of course, the key embedded in ciphertext. The thesis also introduces a method of encryption which utilises dynamic blocks, where the block size is different for each block. Prime numbers are used to drive two random number generators: a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) which takes in the seed and initialises the system and a Blum-Blum Shum (BBS) generator which is used to generate random streams to encrypt messages, images or video clips for example. In each case, the key created is text dependent and therefore will change as each message is sent. The scheme presented in this research is composed of five basic modules. The first module is the key generation module, where the key to be generated is message dependent. The second module, encryption module, performs data encryption. The third module, key exchange module, embeds the key into the encrypted text. Once this is done, the message is transmitted and the recipient uses the key extraction module to retrieve the key and finally the decryption module is executed to decrypt the message and authenticate it. In addition, the message may be compressed before encryption and decompressed by the recipient after decryption using standard compression tools

    Digital watermarking methods for data security and authentication

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    Philosophiae Doctor - PhDCryptology is the study of systems that typically originate from a consideration of the ideal circumstances under which secure information exchange is to take place. It involves the study of cryptographic and other processes that might be introduced for breaking the output of such systems - cryptanalysis. This includes the introduction of formal mathematical methods for the design of a cryptosystem and for estimating its theoretical level of securit

    Optical image compression and encryption methods

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    International audienceOver the years extensive studies have been carried out to apply coherent optics methods in real-time communications and image transmission. This is especially true when a large amount of information needs to be processed, e.g., in high-resolution imaging. The recent progress in data-processing networks and communication systems has considerably increased the capacity of information exchange. However, the transmitted data can be intercepted by nonauthorized people. This explains why considerable effort is being devoted at the current time to data encryption and secure transmission. In addition, only a small part of the overall information is really useful for many applications. Consequently, applications can tolerate information compression that requires important processing when the transmission bit rate is taken into account. To enable efficient and secure information exchange, it is often necessary to reduce the amount of transmitted information. In this context, much work has been undertaken using the principle of coherent optics filtering for selecting relevant information and encrypting it. Compression and encryption operations are often carried out separately, although they are strongly related and can influence each other. Optical processing methodologies, based on filtering, are described that are applicable to transmission and/or data storage. Finally, the advantages and limitations of a set of optical compression and encryption methods are discussed

    Fourier-based automatic alignment for improved visual cryptography schemes

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    International audienceIn Visual Cryptography, several images, called "shadow images", that separately contain no information, are overlapped to reveal a shared secret message. We develop a method to digitally register one printed shadow image acquired by a camera with a purely digital shadow image, stored in memory. Using Fourier techniques derived from Fourier Optics concepts, the idea is to enhance and exploit the quasi periodicity of the shadow images, composed by a random distribution of black and white patterns on a periodic sampling grid. The advantage is to speed up the security control or the access time to the message, in particular in the cases of a small pixel size or of large numbers of pixels. Furthermore, the interest of visual cryptography can be increased by embedding the initial message in two shadow images that do not have identical mathematical supports, making manual registration impractical. Experimental results demonstrate the successful operation of the method, including the possibility to directly project the result onto the printed shadow image

    Robustness of Double Random Phase Encoding spread-space spread-spectrum watermarking technique

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    In this paper the robustness of a recently proposed image watermarking scheme, namely the Double Random Phase Encoding spread-space spread-spectrum watermarking (DRPE SS-SS) technique, is investigated. The watermark, which is chosen to be in the form of a digital barcode image, is numerically encrypted using a simulation of the optical DRPE process. This produces a random complex image, which is then processed to form a real valued random image with a low number of quantization levels. This signal is added to the host image. Extraction of the barcode, involves applying an inverse DRPE process to the watermarked image followed by low pass filtering. This algorithm is designed to utilize the capability of the DRPE to reversibly spread the energy of the watermarking information in both the space and spatial frequency domains. In this way the energy of the watermark in any spatial or spatial frequency bin is very small. To test robustness several common geometric transformations and signal processing operations are performed using both informed and blind detections for different barcode widths and different quantization levels. The results presented indicate that while the DRPE SS-SS method is robust to scaling, and JPEG compression distortion, it is especially robust to spatial cropping and both low and high pass filtering. Both random-watermark and random-host false positive cases are examined. The uniqueness of the watermark is demonstrated, and it is shown that the DRPE SS-SS has very low false positive errors, and that the larger the barcode width, the lower the false positive rate. Finally the effects of both printing and scanning are examined

    Holographic representation: Hologram plane vs. object plane

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    Digital holography allows the recording, storage and subsequent reconstruction of both amplitude and phase of the light field scattered by an object. This is accomplished by recording interference patterns that preserve the properties of the original object field essential for 3D visualization, the so-called holograms. Digital holography refers to the acquisition of holograms with a digital sensor, typically a CCD or a CMOS camera, and to the reconstruction of the 3D object field using numerical methods. In the current work, the different representations of digital holographic information in the hologram and in the object planes are studied. The coding performance of the different complex field representations, notably Amplitude-Phase and Real-Imaginary, in both the hologram plane and the object plane, is assessed using both computer generated and experimental holograms. The HEVC intra main coding profile is used for the compression of the different representations in both planes, either for experimental holograms or computer generated holograms. The HEVC intra compression in the object plane outperforms encoding in the hologram plane. Furthermore, encoding computer generated holograms in the object plane has a larger benefit than the same encoding over the experimental holograms. This difference was expected, since experimental holograms are affected by a larger negative influence of speckle noise, resulting in a loss of compression efficiency. This work emphasizes the possibility of holographic coding on the object plane, instead of the common encoding in the hologram plane approach. Moreover, this possibility allows direct visualization of the Object Plane Amplitude in a regular 2D display without any transformation methods. The complementary phase information can easily be used to render 3D features such as depth map, multi-view or even holographic interference patterns for further 3D visualization depending on the display technology.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Improving reconstructions of digital holograms

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    Digital holography is a two step process of recording a hologram on an electronic sensor and reconstructing it numerically. This thesis makes a number of contri- butions to the second step of this process. These can be split into two distinct parts: A) speckle reduction in reconstructions of digital holograms (DHs), and B) modeling and overcoming partial occlusion e®ects in reconstructions of DHs, and using occlusions to reduce the effects of the twin image in reconstructions of DHs. Part A represents the major part of this thesis. Speckle reduction forms an important step in many digital holographic applications and we have developed a number of techniques that can be used to reduce its corruptive effect in recon- structions of DHs. These techniques range from 3D filtering of DH reconstructions to a technique that filters in the Fourier domain of the reconstructed DH. We have also investigated the most commonly used industrial speckle reduction technique - wavelet filters. In Part B, we investigate the nature of opaque and non-opaque partial occlusions. We motivate this work by trying to ¯nd a subset of pixels that overcome the effects of a partial occlusion, thus revealing otherwise hidden features on an object captured using digital holography. Finally, we have used an occlusion at the twin image plane to completely remove the corrupting effect of the out-of-focus twin image on reconstructions of DHs
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