66,928 research outputs found
Privacy-Preserving Electronic Ticket Scheme with Attribute-based Credentials
Electronic tickets (e-tickets) are electronic versions of paper tickets,
which enable users to access intended services and improve services'
efficiency. However, privacy may be a concern of e-ticket users. In this paper,
a privacy-preserving electronic ticket scheme with attribute-based credentials
is proposed to protect users' privacy and facilitate ticketing based on a
user's attributes. Our proposed scheme makes the following contributions: (1)
users can buy different tickets from ticket sellers without releasing their
exact attributes; (2) two tickets of the same user cannot be linked; (3) a
ticket cannot be transferred to another user; (4) a ticket cannot be double
spent; (5) the security of the proposed scheme is formally proven and reduced
to well known (q-strong Diffie-Hellman) complexity assumption; (6) the scheme
has been implemented and its performance empirically evaluated. To the best of
our knowledge, our privacy-preserving attribute-based e-ticket scheme is the
first one providing these five features. Application areas of our scheme
include event or transport tickets where users must convince ticket sellers
that their attributes (e.g. age, profession, location) satisfy the ticket price
policies to buy discounted tickets. More generally, our scheme can be used in
any system where access to services is only dependent on a user's attributes
(or entitlements) but not their identities.Comment: 18pages, 6 figures, 2 table
Fine-To-Coarse Global Registration of RGB-D Scans
RGB-D scanning of indoor environments is important for many applications,
including real estate, interior design, and virtual reality. However, it is
still challenging to register RGB-D images from a hand-held camera over a long
video sequence into a globally consistent 3D model. Current methods often can
lose tracking or drift and thus fail to reconstruct salient structures in large
environments (e.g., parallel walls in different rooms). To address this
problem, we propose a "fine-to-coarse" global registration algorithm that
leverages robust registrations at finer scales to seed detection and
enforcement of new correspondence and structural constraints at coarser scales.
To test global registration algorithms, we provide a benchmark with 10,401
manually-clicked point correspondences in 25 scenes from the SUN3D dataset.
During experiments with this benchmark, we find that our fine-to-coarse
algorithm registers long RGB-D sequences better than previous methods
A formal methodology for integral security design and verification of network protocols
We propose a methodology for verifying security properties of network
protocols at design level. It can be separated in two main parts: context and
requirements analysis and informal verification; and formal representation and
procedural verification. It is an iterative process where the early steps are
simpler than the last ones. Therefore, the effort required for detecting flaws
is proportional to the complexity of the associated attack. Thus, we avoid
wasting valuable resources for simple flaws that can be detected early in the
verification process. In order to illustrate the advantages provided by our
methodology, we also analyze three real protocols
Quality of fixed dose artemether/lumefantrine products in Jimma Zone, Ethiopia
Background: Malaria caused by Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum is among the major public health problems in most endemic areas of the world. Artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) has been recommended as a first-line treatment for uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria almost in all endemic regions. Since ineffectively regulated medicines in resource limited settings could favour infiltration of poor quality anti-malarial medicines into pharmaceutical supply chain and jeopardize a positive treatment outcome, regular monitoring of the quality of anti-malarial medicines is critical. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the quality of fixed dose combination (FDC) artemether (ART)/lumefantrine (LUM) tablets available in Jimma zone, Ethiopia.
Methods: This study was conducted in Jimma zone, Ethiopia. A total of 74 samples of FDC ART/LUM (20mg ART/120mg LUM) tablets were collected from 27 public facilities. All samples were subjected to visual inspection and the relevant information was recorded. The samples were transported to Jimma University Laboratory of Drug Quality (JuLaDQ) and stored at ambient temperature (20 degrees C to 25 degrees C) until analysis. The Pharmacopoeial conform/non-conform methods and the risk-based Derringer's desirability function approach were employed to assess the pharmaceutical quality of the investigated products.
Results: The visual inspection results revealed that there were no signs of falsified in the investigated products. Identification test results of samples indicated that all samples contained the stated active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). The results of uniformity of mass indicated that all samples complied with International Pharmacopoeial specification limits. The assay results, expressed as percent label claim (%lc) of ART (89.8 to 108.8%, meanSD=99.1 +/- 3.9%) and LUM (90.0 to 111.9%, mean +/- SD=98.2 +/- 3.8%) revealed that, all samples complied with International Pharmacopoeia acceptance specification limits (i.e. 90-110%lc), except one generic product (IPCA Laboratories Ltd., India) which contains excessive LUM (111.9 +/- 1.7%lc). The risk priority number (RPN) results revealed that assay (RPN=392) is relatively the most critical quality attribute followed by identity (RPN=280) and mass uniformity (40). Quality evaluation based on psycho-physical Harrington's scale revealed that more than 96% of samples were within the acceptable ranges (D >= 0.7-1.0).
Conclusions: Both Pharmacopoeial and risk-based desirability function approaches to quality evaluation applied to the investigated products revealed that above 96% FDC ART/LUM tablets circulating in public settings of Jimma zone are of good quality
Retrieval and Registration of Long-Range Overlapping Frames for Scalable Mosaicking of In Vivo Fetoscopy
Purpose: The standard clinical treatment of Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome
consists in the photo-coagulation of undesired anastomoses located on the
placenta which are responsible to a blood transfer between the two twins. While
being the standard of care procedure, fetoscopy suffers from a limited
field-of-view of the placenta resulting in missed anastomoses. To facilitate
the task of the clinician, building a global map of the placenta providing a
larger overview of the vascular network is highly desired. Methods: To overcome
the challenging visual conditions inherent to in vivo sequences (low contrast,
obstructions or presence of artifacts, among others), we propose the following
contributions: (i) robust pairwise registration is achieved by aligning the
orientation of the image gradients, and (ii) difficulties regarding long-range
consistency (e.g. due to the presence of outliers) is tackled via a bag-of-word
strategy, which identifies overlapping frames of the sequence to be registered
regardless of their respective location in time. Results: In addition to visual
difficulties, in vivo sequences are characterised by the intrinsic absence of
gold standard. We present mosaics motivating qualitatively our methodological
choices and demonstrating their promising aspect. We also demonstrate
semi-quantitatively, via visual inspection of registration results, the
efficacy of our registration approach in comparison to two standard baselines.
Conclusion: This paper proposes the first approach for the construction of
mosaics of placenta in in vivo fetoscopy sequences. Robustness to visual
challenges during registration and long-range temporal consistency are
proposed, offering first positive results on in vivo data for which standard
mosaicking techniques are not applicable.Comment: Accepted for publication in International Journal of Computer
Assisted Radiology and Surgery (IJCARS
Robust Photogeometric Localization over Time for Map-Centric Loop Closure
Map-centric SLAM is emerging as an alternative of conventional graph-based
SLAM for its accuracy and efficiency in long-term mapping problems. However, in
map-centric SLAM, the process of loop closure differs from that of conventional
SLAM and the result of incorrect loop closure is more destructive and is not
reversible. In this paper, we present a tightly coupled photogeometric metric
localization for the loop closure problem in map-centric SLAM. In particular,
our method combines complementary constraints from LiDAR and camera sensors,
and validates loop closure candidates with sequential observations. The
proposed method provides a visual evidence-based outlier rejection where
failures caused by either place recognition or localization outliers can be
effectively removed. We demonstrate the proposed method is not only more
accurate than the conventional global ICP methods but is also robust to
incorrect initial pose guesses.Comment: To Appear in IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS, ACCEPTED JANUARY
201
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