Rateless Codes with Progressive Recovery for Layered Multimedia Delivery

This paper proposes a novel approach, based on unequal error protection, to enhance rateless codes with progressive recovery for layered multimedia delivery. With a parallel encoding structure, the proposed Progressive Rateless codes (PRC) assign unequal redundancy to each layer in accordance with their importance. Each output symbol contains information from all layers, and thus the stream layers can be recovered progressively at the expected received ratios of output symbols. Furthermore, the dependency between layers is naturally considered. The performance of the PRC is evaluated and compared with some related UEP approaches. Results show that our PRC approach provides better recovery performance with lower overhead both theoretically and numerically

Introducing keytagging, a novel technique for the protection of medical image-based tests

This paper introduces keytagging, a novel technique to protect medical image-based tests by implementing image authentication, integrity control and location of tampered areas, private captioning with role-based access control, traceability and copyright protection. It relies on the association of tags (binary data strings) to stable, semistable or volatile features of the image, whose access keys (called keytags) depend on both the image and the tag content. Unlike watermarking, this technique can associate information to the most stable features of the image without distortion. Thus, this method preserves the clinical content of the image without the need for assessment, prevents eavesdropping and collusion attacks, and obtains a substantial capacity-robustness tradeoff with simple operations. The evaluation of this technique, involving images of different sizes from various acquisition modalities and image modifications that are typical in the medical context, demonstrates that all the aforementioned security measures can be implemented simultaneously and that the algorithm presents good scalability. In addition to this, keytags can be protected with standard Cryptographic Message Syntax and the keytagging process can be easily combined with JPEG2000 compression since both share the same wavelet transform. This reduces the delays for associating keytags and retrieving the corresponding tags to implement the aforementioned measures to only ¿30 and ¿90. ms respectively. As a result, keytags can be seamlessly integrated within DICOM, reducing delays and bandwidth when the image test is updated and shared in secure architectures where different users cooperate, e.g. physicians who interpret the test, clinicians caring for the patient and researchers

Design of a secure architecture for the exchange of biomedical information in m-Health scenarios

El paradigma de m-Salud (salud móvil) aboga por la integración masiva de las más avanzadas tecnologías de comunicación, red móvil y sensores en aplicaciones y sistemas de salud, para fomentar el despliegue de un nuevo modelo de atención clínica centrada en el usuario/paciente. Este modelo tiene por objetivos el empoderamiento de los usuarios en la gestión de su propia salud (p.ej. aumentando sus conocimientos, promocionando estilos de vida saludable y previniendo enfermedades), la prestación de una mejor tele-asistencia sanitaria en el hogar para ancianos y pacientes crónicos y una notable disminución del gasto de los Sistemas de Salud gracias a la reducción del número y la duración de las hospitalizaciones. No obstante, estas ventajas, atribuidas a las aplicaciones de m-Salud, suelen venir acompañadas del requisito de un alto grado de disponibilidad de la información biomédica de sus usuarios para garantizar una alta calidad de servicio, p.ej. fusionar varias señales de un usuario para obtener un diagnóstico más preciso. La consecuencia negativa de cumplir esta demanda es el aumento directo de las superficies potencialmente vulnerables a ataques, lo que sitúa a la seguridad (y a la privacidad) del modelo de m-Salud como factor crítico para su éxito. Como requisito no funcional de las aplicaciones de m-Salud, la seguridad ha recibido menos atención que otros requisitos técnicos que eran más urgentes en etapas de desarrollo previas, tales como la robustez, la eficiencia, la interoperabilidad o la usabilidad. Otro factor importante que ha contribuido a retrasar la implementación de políticas de seguridad sólidas es que garantizar un determinado nivel de seguridad implica unos costes que pueden ser muy relevantes en varias dimensiones, en especial en la económica (p.ej. sobrecostes por la inclusión de hardware extra para la autenticación de usuarios), en el rendimiento (p.ej. reducción de la eficiencia y de la interoperabilidad debido a la integración de elementos de seguridad) y en la usabilidad (p.ej. configuración más complicada de dispositivos y aplicaciones de salud debido a las nuevas opciones de seguridad). Por tanto, las soluciones de seguridad que persigan satisfacer a todos los actores del contexto de m-Salud (usuarios, pacientes, personal médico, personal técnico, legisladores, fabricantes de dispositivos y equipos, etc.) deben ser robustas y al mismo tiempo minimizar sus costes asociados. Esta Tesis detalla una propuesta de seguridad, compuesta por cuatro grandes bloques interconectados, para dotar de seguridad a las arquitecturas de m-Salud con unos costes reducidos. El primer bloque define un esquema global que proporciona unos niveles de seguridad e interoperabilidad acordes con las características de las distintas aplicaciones de m-Salud. Este esquema está compuesto por tres capas diferenciadas, diseñadas a la medidas de los dominios de m-Salud y de sus restricciones, incluyendo medidas de seguridad adecuadas para la defensa contra las amenazas asociadas a sus aplicaciones de m-Salud. El segundo bloque establece la extensión de seguridad de aquellos protocolos estándar que permiten la adquisición, el intercambio y/o la administración de información biomédica -- por tanto, usados por muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud -- pero no reúnen los niveles de seguridad detallados en el esquema previo. Estas extensiones se concretan para los estándares biomédicos ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD y SCP-ECG. El tercer bloque propone nuevas formas de fortalecer la seguridad de los tests biomédicos, que constituyen el elemento esencial de muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud de carácter clínico, mediante codificaciones novedosas. Finalmente el cuarto bloque, que se sitúa en paralelo a los anteriores, selecciona herramientas genéricas de seguridad (elementos de autenticación y criptográficos) cuya integración en los otros bloques resulta idónea, y desarrolla nuevas herramientas de seguridad, basadas en señal -- embedding y keytagging --, para reforzar la protección de los test biomédicos.The paradigm of m-Health (mobile health) advocates for the massive integration of advanced mobile communications, network and sensor technologies in healthcare applications and systems to foster the deployment of a new, user/patient-centered healthcare model enabling the empowerment of users in the management of their health (e.g. by increasing their health literacy, promoting healthy lifestyles and the prevention of diseases), a better home-based healthcare delivery for elderly and chronic patients and important savings for healthcare systems due to the reduction of hospitalizations in number and duration. It is a fact that many m-Health applications demand high availability of biomedical information from their users (for further accurate analysis, e.g. by fusion of various signals) to guarantee high quality of service, which on the other hand entails increasing the potential surfaces for attacks. Therefore, it is not surprising that security (and privacy) is commonly included among the most important barriers for the success of m-Health. As a non-functional requirement for m-Health applications, security has received less attention than other technical issues that were more pressing at earlier development stages, such as reliability, eficiency, interoperability or usability. Another fact that has contributed to delaying the enforcement of robust security policies is that guaranteeing a certain security level implies costs that can be very relevant and that span along diferent dimensions. These include budgeting (e.g. the demand of extra hardware for user authentication), performance (e.g. lower eficiency and interoperability due to the addition of security elements) and usability (e.g. cumbersome configuration of devices and applications due to security options). Therefore, security solutions that aim to satisfy all the stakeholders in the m-Health context (users/patients, medical staff, technical staff, systems and devices manufacturers, regulators, etc.) shall be robust and, at the same time, minimize their associated costs. This Thesis details a proposal, composed of four interrelated blocks, to integrate appropriate levels of security in m-Health architectures in a cost-efcient manner. The first block designes a global scheme that provides different security and interoperability levels accordingto how critical are the m-Health applications to be implemented. This consists ofthree layers tailored to the m-Health domains and their constraints, whose security countermeasures defend against the threats of their associated m-Health applications. Next, the second block addresses the security extension of those standard protocols that enable the acquisition, exchange and/or management of biomedical information | thus, used by many m-Health applications | but do not meet the security levels described in the former scheme. These extensions are materialized for the biomedical standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG. Then, the third block proposes new ways of enhancing the security of biomedical standards, which are the centerpiece of many clinical m-Health applications, by means of novel codings. Finally the fourth block, with is parallel to the others, selects generic security methods (for user authentication and cryptographic protection) whose integration in the other blocks results optimal, and also develops novel signal-based methods (embedding and keytagging) for strengthening the security of biomedical tests. The layer-based extensions of the standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG can be considered as robust, cost-eficient and respectful with their original features and contents. The former adds no attributes to its data information model, four new frames to the service model |and extends four with new sub-frames|, and only one new sub-state to the communication model. Furthermore, a lightweight architecture consisting of a personal health device mounting a 9 MHz processor and an aggregator mounting a 1 GHz processor is enough to transmit a 3-lead electrocardiogram in real-time implementing the top security layer. The extra requirements associated to this extension are an initial configuration of the health device and the aggregator, tokens for identification/authentication of users if these devices are to be shared and the implementation of certain IHE profiles in the aggregator to enable the integration of measurements in healthcare systems. As regards to the extension of SCP-ECG, it only adds a new section with selected security elements and syntax in order to protect the rest of file contents and provide proper role-based access control. The overhead introduced in the protected SCP-ECG is typically 2{13 % of the regular file size, and the extra delays to protect a newly generated SCP-ECG file and to access it for interpretation are respectively a 2{10 % and a 5 % of the regular delays. As regards to the signal-based security techniques developed, the embedding method is the basis for the proposal of a generic coding for tests composed of biomedical signals, periodic measurements and contextual information. This has been adjusted and evaluated with electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram-based tests, proving the objective clinical quality of the coded tests, the capacity of the coding-access system to operate in real-time (overall delays of 2 s for electrocardiograms and 3.3 s for electroencephalograms) and its high usability. Despite of the embedding of security and metadata to enable m-Health services, the compression ratios obtained by this coding range from ' 3 in real-time transmission to ' 5 in offline operation. Complementarily, keytagging permits associating information to images (and other signals) by means of keys in a secure and non-distorting fashion, which has been availed to implement security measures such as image authentication, integrity control and location of tampered areas, private captioning with role-based access control, traceability and copyright protection. The tests conducted indicate a remarkable robustness-capacity tradeoff that permits implementing all this measures simultaneously, and the compatibility of keytagging with JPEG2000 compression, maintaining this tradeoff while setting the overall keytagging delay in only ' 120 ms for any image size | evidencing the scalability of this technique. As a general conclusion, it has been demonstrated and illustrated with examples that there are various, complementary and structured manners to contribute in the implementation of suitable security levels for m-Health architectures with a moderate cost in budget, performance, interoperability and usability. The m-Health landscape is evolving permanently along all their dimensions, and this Thesis aims to do so with its security. Furthermore, the lessons learned herein may offer further guidance for the elaboration of more comprehensive and updated security schemes, for the extension of other biomedical standards featuring low emphasis on security or privacy, and for the improvement of the state of the art regarding signal-based protection methods and applications

Context-based bit plane golomb coder for scalable image coding

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

Discrete Wavelet Transforms

The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) algorithms have a firm position in processing of signals in several areas of research and industry. As DWT provides both octave-scale frequency and spatial timing of the analyzed signal, it is constantly used to solve and treat more and more advanced problems. The present book: Discrete Wavelet Transforms: Algorithms and Applications reviews the recent progress in discrete wavelet transform algorithms and applications. The book covers a wide range of methods (e.g. lifting, shift invariance, multi-scale analysis) for constructing DWTs. The book chapters are organized into four major parts. Part I describes the progress in hardware implementations of the DWT algorithms. Applications include multitone modulation for ADSL and equalization techniques, a scalable architecture for FPGA-implementation, lifting based algorithm for VLSI implementation, comparison between DWT and FFT based OFDM and modified SPIHT codec. Part II addresses image processing algorithms such as multiresolution approach for edge detection, low bit rate image compression, low complexity implementation of CQF wavelets and compression of multi-component images. Part III focuses watermaking DWT algorithms. Finally, Part IV describes shift invariant DWTs, DC lossless property, DWT based analysis and estimation of colored noise and an application of the wavelet Galerkin method. The chapters of the present book consist of both tutorial and highly advanced material. Therefore, the book is intended to be a reference text for graduate students and researchers to obtain state-of-the-art knowledge on specific applications

Computational inference and control of quality in multimedia services

Quality is the degree of excellence we expect of a service or a product. It is also one of the key factors that determine its value. For multimedia services, understanding the experienced quality means understanding how the delivered delity, precision and reliability correspond to the users' expectations. Yet the quality of multimedia services is inextricably linked to the underlying technology. It is developments in video recording, compression and transport as well as display technologies that enables high quality multimedia services to become ubiquitous. The constant evolution of these technologies delivers a steady increase in performance, but also a growing level of complexity. As new technologies stack on top of each other the interactions between them and their components become more intricate and obscure. In this environment optimizing the delivered quality of multimedia services becomes increasingly challenging. The factors that aect the experienced quality, or Quality of Experience (QoE), tend to have complex non-linear relationships. The subjectively perceived QoE is hard to measure directly and continuously evolves with the user's expectations. Faced with the diculty of designing an expert system for QoE management that relies on painstaking measurements and intricate heuristics, we turn to an approach based on learning or inference. The set of solutions presented in this work rely on computational intelligence techniques that do inference over the large set of signals coming from the system to deliver QoE models based on user feedback. We furthermore present solutions for inference of optimized control in systems with no guarantees for resource availability. This approach oers the opportunity to be more accurate in assessing the perceived quality, to incorporate more factors and to adapt as technology and user expectations evolve. In a similar fashion, the inferred control strategies can uncover more intricate patterns coming from the sensors and therefore implement farther-reaching decisions. Similarly to natural systems, this continuous adaptation and learning makes these systems more robust to perturbations in the environment, longer lasting accuracy and higher eciency in dealing with increased complexity. Overcoming this increasing complexity and diversity is crucial for addressing the challenges of future multimedia system. Through experiments and simulations this work demonstrates that adopting an approach of learning can improve the sub jective and objective QoE estimation, enable the implementation of ecient and scalable QoE management as well as ecient control mechanisms

Técnicas de compresión de imágenes hiperespectrales sobre hardware reconfigurable

Tesis de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, leída el 18-12-2020Sensors are nowadays in all aspects of human life. When possible, sensors are used remotely. This is less intrusive, avoids interferces in the measuring process, and more convenient for the scientist. One of the most recurrent concerns in the last decades has been sustainability of the planet, and how the changes it is facing can be monitored. Remote sensing of the earth has seen an explosion in activity, with satellites now being launched on a weekly basis to perform remote analysis of the earth, and planes surveying vast areas for closer analysis...Los sensores aparecen hoy en día en todos los aspectos de nuestra vida. Cuando es posible, de manera remota. Esto es menos intrusivo, evita interferencias en el proceso de medida, y además facilita el trabajo científico. Una de las preocupaciones recurrentes en las últimas décadas ha sido la sotenibilidad del planeta, y cómo menitoirzar los cambios a los que se enfrenta. Los estudios remotos de la tierra han visto un gran crecimiento, con satélites lanzados semanalmente para analizar la superficie, y aviones sobrevolando grades áreas para análisis más precisos...Fac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu

Statistical Tools for Digital Image Forensics

A digitally altered image, often leaving no visual clues of having been tampered with, can be indistinguishable from an authentic image. The tampering, however, may disturb some underlying statistical properties of the image. Under this assumption, we propose five techniques that quantify and detect statistical perturbations found in different forms of tampered images: (1) re-sampled images (e.g., scaled or rotated); (2) manipulated color filter array interpolated images; (3) double JPEG compressed images; (4) images with duplicated regions; and (5) images with inconsistent noise patterns. These techniques work in the absence of any embedded watermarks or signatures. For each technique we develop the theoretical foundation, show its effectiveness on credible forgeries, and analyze its sensitivity and robustness to simple counter-attacks

Sparse representation based hyperspectral image compression and classification

Abstract This thesis presents a research work on applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image compression and hyperspectral image classification. The proposed lossy hyperspectral image compression framework introduces two types of dictionaries distinguished by the terms sparse representation spectral dictionary (SRSD) and multi-scale spectral dictionary (MSSD), respectively. The former is learnt in the spectral domain to exploit the spectral correlations, and the latter in wavelet multi-scale spectral domain to exploit both spatial and spectral correlations in hyperspectral images. To alleviate the computational demand of dictionary learning, either a base dictionary trained offline or an update of the base dictionary is employed in the compression framework. The proposed compression method is evaluated in terms of different objective metrics, and compared to selected state-of-the-art hyperspectral image compression schemes, including JPEG 2000. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of both SRSD and MSSD approaches. For the proposed hyperspectral image classification method, we utilize the sparse coefficients for training support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbour (kNN) classifiers. In particular, the discriminative character of the sparse coefficients is enhanced by incorporating contextual information using local mean filters. The classification performance is evaluated and compared to a number of similar or representative methods. The results show that our approach could outperform other approaches based on SVM or sparse representation. This thesis makes the following contributions. It provides a relatively thorough investigation of applying sparse representation to lossy hyperspectral image compression. Specifically, it reveals the effectiveness of sparse representation for the exploitation of spectral correlations in hyperspectral images. In addition, we have shown that the discriminative character of sparse coefficients can lead to superior performance in hyperspectral image classification.EM201