Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

Shape-based invariant features extraction for object recognition

International audienceThe emergence of new technologies enables generating large quantity of digital information including images; this leads to an increasing number of generated digital images. Therefore it appears a necessity for automatic systems for image retrieval. These systems consist of techniques used for query specification and re-trieval of images from an image collection. The most frequent and the most com-mon means for image retrieval is the indexing using textual keywords. But for some special application domains and face to the huge quantity of images, key-words are no more sufficient or unpractical. Moreover, images are rich in content; so in order to overcome these mentioned difficulties, some approaches are pro-posed based on visual features derived directly from the content of the image: these are the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) approaches. They allow users to search the desired image by specifying image queries: a query can be an exam-ple, a sketch or visual features (e.g., colour, texture and shape). Once the features have been defined and extracted, the retrieval becomes a task of measuring simi-larity between image features. An important property of these features is to be in-variant under various deformations that the observed image could undergo. In this chapter, we will present a number of existing methods for CBIR applica-tions. We will also describe some measures that are usually used for similarity measurement. At the end, and as an application example, we present a specific ap-proach, that we are developing, to illustrate the topic by providing experimental results

Detecção de vivacidade de impressões digitais baseada em software

Orientador: Roberto de Alencar LotufoDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Com o uso crescente de sistemas de autenticação por biometria nos últimos anos, a detecção de impressões digitais falsas tem se tornado cada vez mais importante. Neste trabalho, nós implementamos e comparamos várias técnicas baseadas em software para detecção de vivacidade de impressões digitais. Utilizamos como extratores de características as redes convolucionais, que foram usadas pela primeira vez nesta área, e Local Binary Patterns (LBP). As técnicas foram usadas em conjunto com redução de dimensionalidade através da Análise de Componentes Principais (PCA) e um classificador Support Vector Machine (SVM). O aumento artificial de dados foi usado de forma bem sucedida para melhorar o desempenho do classificador. Testamos uma variedade de operações de pré-processamento, tais como filtragem em frequência, equalização de contraste e filtragem da região de interesse. Graças aos computadores de alto desempenho disponíveis como serviços em nuvem, foi possível realizar uma busca extensa e automática para encontrar a melhor combinação de operações de pré-processamento, arquiteturas e hiper-parâmetros. Os experimentos foram realizados nos conjuntos de dados usados nas competições Liveness Detection nos anos de 2009, 2011 e 2013, que juntos somam quase 50.000 imagens de impressões digitais falsas e verdadeiras. Nosso melhor método atinge uma taxa média de amostras classificadas corretamente de 95,2%, o que representa uma melhora de 59% na taxa de erro quando comparado com os melhores resultados publicados anteriormenteAbstract: With the growing use of biometric authentication systems in the past years, spoof fingerprint detection has become increasingly important. In this work, we implemented and compared various techniques for software-based fingerprint liveness detection. We use as feature extractors Convolutional Networks with random weights, which are applied for the first time for this task, and Local Binary Patterns. The techniques were used in conjunction with dimensionality reduction through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Dataset Augmentation was successfully used to increase classifier¿s performance. We tested a variety of preprocessing operations such as frequency filtering, contrast equalization, and region of interest filtering. An automatic and extensive search for the best combination of preprocessing operations, architectures and hyper-parameters was made, thanks to the fast computers available as cloud services. The experiments were made on the datasets used in The Liveness Detection Competition of years 2009, 2011 and 2013 that comprise almost 50,000 real and fake fingerprints¿ images. Our best method achieves an overall rate of 95.2% of correctly classified samples - an improvement of 59% in test error when compared with the best previously published resultsMestradoEnergia EletricaMestre em Engenharia Elétric

Speckle Noise Reduction via Homomorphic Elliptical Threshold Rotations in the Complex Wavelet Domain

Many clinicians regard speckle noise as an undesirable artifact in ultrasound images masking the underlying pathology within a patient. Speckle noise is a random interference pattern formed by coherent radiation in a medium containing many sub-resolution scatterers. Speckle has a negative impact on ultrasound images as the texture does not reflect the local echogenicity of the underlying scatterers. Studies have shown that the presence of speckle noise can reduce a physician's ability to detect lesions by a factor of eight. Without speckle, small high-contrast targets, low contrast objects, and image texture can be deduced quite readily. Speckle filtering of medical ultrasound images represents a critical pre-processing step, providing clinicians with enhanced diagnostic ability. Efficient speckle noise removal algorithms may also find applications in real time surgical guidance assemblies. However, it is vital that regions of interests are not compromised during speckle removal. This research pertains to the reduction of speckle noise in ultrasound images while attempting to retain clinical regions of interest. Recently, the advance of wavelet theory has lead to many applications in noise reduction and compression. Upon investigation of these two divergent fields, it was found that the speckle noise tends to rotate an image's homomorphic complex-wavelet coefficients. This work proposes a new speckle reduction filter involving a counter-rotation of these complex-wavelet coefficients to mitigate the presence of speckle noise. Simulations suggest the proposed denoising technique offers superior visual quality, though its signal-to-mean-square-error ratio (S/MSE) is numerically comparable to adaptive frost and kuan filtering. This research improves the quality of ultrasound medical images, leading to improved diagnosis for one of the most popular and cost effective imaging modalities used in clinical medicine

Video content analysis for automated detection and tracking of humans in CCTV surveillance applications

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The problems of achieving high detection rate with low false alarm rate for human detection and tracking in video sequence, performance scalability, and improving response time are addressed in this thesis. The underlying causes are the effect of scene complexity, human-to-human interactions, scale changes, and scene background-human interactions. A two-stage processing solution, namely, human detection, and human tracking with two novel pattern classifiers is presented. Scale independent human detection is achieved by processing in the wavelet domain using square wavelet features. These features used to characterise human silhouettes at different scales are similar to rectangular features used in [Viola 2001]. At the detection stage two detectors are combined to improve detection rate. The first detector is based on shape-outline of humans extracted from the scene using a reduced complexity outline extraction algorithm. A Shape mismatch measure is used to differentiate between the human and the background class. The second detector uses rectangular features as primitives for silhouette description in the wavelet domain. The marginal distribution of features collocated at a particular position on a candidate human (a patch of the image) is used to describe statistically the silhouette. Two similarity measures are computed between a candidate human and the model histograms of human and non human classes. The similarity measure is used to discriminate between the human and the non human class. At the tracking stage, a tracker based on joint probabilistic data association filter (JPDAF) for data association, and motion correspondence is presented. Track clustering is used to reduce hypothesis enumeration complexity. Towards improving response time with increase in frame dimension, scene complexity, and number of channels; a scalable algorithmic architecture and operating accuracy prediction technique is presented. A scheduling strategy for improving the response time and throughput by parallel processing is also presented

Image Registration Using Redundant Wavelet Transforms

Imagery is collected much faster and in significantly greater quantities today compared to a few years ago. Accurate registration of this imagery is vital for comparing the similarities and differences between multiple images. Since human analysis is tedious and error prone for large data sets, we require an automatic, efficient, robust, and accurate method to register images. Wavelet transforms have proven useful for a variety of signal and image processing tasks, including image registration. In our research, we present a fundamentally new wavelet-based registration algorithm utilizing redundant transforms and a masking process to suppress the adverse effects of noise and improve processing efficiency. The shift-invariant wavelet transform is applied in translation estimation and a new rotation-invariant polar wavelet transform is effectively utilized in rotation estimation. We demonstrate the robustness of these redundant wavelet transforms for the registration of two images (i.e., translating or rotating an input image to a reference image), but extensions to larger data sets are certainly feasible. We compare the registration accuracy of our redundant wavelet transforms to the \u27critically sampled\u27 discrete wavelet transform using the Daubechies (7,9) wavelet to illustrate the power of our algorithm in the presence of significant additive white Gaussian noise and strongly translated or rotated images