QUALITY-DRIVEN CROSS LAYER DESIGN FOR MULTIMEDIA SECURITY OVER RESOURCE CONSTRAINED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

The strong need for security guarantee, e.g., integrity and authenticity, as well as privacy and confidentiality in wireless multimedia services has driven the development of an emerging research area in low cost Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Unfortunately, those conventional encryption and authentication techniques cannot be applied directly to WMSNs due to inborn challenges such as extremely limited energy, computing and bandwidth resources. This dissertation provides a quality-driven security design and resource allocation framework for WMSNs. The contribution of this dissertation bridges the inter-disciplinary research gap between high layer multimedia signal processing and low layer computer networking. It formulates the generic problem of quality-driven multimedia resource allocation in WMSNs and proposes a cross layer solution. The fundamental methodologies of multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication, and their application to digital image or video compression standards are presented. New multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication schemes are proposed at application layer, which significantly reduces encryption/authentication complexity. In addition, network resource allocation methodologies at low layers are extensively studied. An unequal error protection-based network resource allocation scheme is proposed to achieve the best effort media quality with integrity and energy efficiency guarantee. Performance evaluation results show that this cross layer framework achieves considerable energy-quality-security gain by jointly designing multimedia selective encryption/multimedia stream authentication and communication resource allocation

Digital Signal Processing Research Program

Contains table of contents for Section 2, an introduction, reports on twenty-two research projects and a list of publications.Sanders, a Lockheed-Martin Corporation Contract BZ4962U.S. Army Research Laboratory Contract DAAL01-96-2-0001U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-93-1-0686National Science Foundation Grant MIP 95-02885U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-96-1-0930National Defense Science and Engineering FellowshipU.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research Grant F49620-96-1-0072U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-95-1-0362National Science Foundation Graduate Research FellowshipAT&T Bell Laboratories Graduate Research FellowshipU.S. Army Research Laboratory Contract DAAL01-96-2-0002National Science Foundation Graduate FellowshipU.S. Army Research Laboratory/Advanced Sensors Federated Lab Program Contract DAAL01-96-2-000

An Investigation of Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplexing Techniques as an Alternative to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Transmissions and Comparison of Wavelet Families and Their Children

Recently, issues surrounding wireless communications have risen to prominence because of the increase in the popularity of wireless applications. Bandwidth problems, and the difficulty of modulating signals across carriers, represent significant challenges. Every modulation scheme used to date has had limitations, and the use of the Discrete Fourier Transform in OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) is no exception. The restriction on further development of OFDM lies primarily within the type of transform it uses in the heart of its system, Fourier transform. OFDM suffers from sensitivity to Peak to Average Power Ratio, carrier frequency offset and wasting some bandwidth to guard successive OFDM symbols. The discovery of the wavelet transform has opened up a number of potential applications from image compression to watermarking and encryption. Very recently, work has been done to investigate the potential of using wavelet transforms within the communication space. This research will further investigate a recently proposed, innovative, modulation technique, Orthogonal Wavelet Division Multiplex, which utilises the wavelet transform opening a new avenue for an alternative modulation scheme with some interesting potential characteristics. Wavelet transform has many families and each of those families has children which each differ in filter length. This research consider comprehensively investigates the new modulation scheme, and proposes multi-level dynamic sub-banding as a tool to adapt variable signal bandwidths. Furthermore, all compactly supported wavelet families and their associated children of those families are investigated and evaluated against each other and compared with OFDM. The linear computational complexity of wavelet transform is less than the logarithmic complexity of Fourier in OFDM. The more important complexity is the operational complexity which is cost effectiveness, such as the time response of the system, the memory consumption and the number of iterative operations required for data processing. Those complexities are investigated for all available compactly supported wavelet families and their children and compared with OFDM. The evaluation reveals which wavelet families perform more effectively than OFDM, and for each wavelet family identifies which family children perform the best. Based on these results, it is concluded that the wavelet modulation scheme has some interesting advantages over OFDM, such as lower complexity and bandwidth conservation of up to 25%, due to the elimination of guard intervals and dynamic bandwidth allocation, which result in better cost effectiveness

Applications of MATLAB in Science and Engineering

The book consists of 24 chapters illustrating a wide range of areas where MATLAB tools are applied. These areas include mathematics, physics, chemistry and chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biological (molecular biology) and medical sciences, communication and control systems, digital signal, image and video processing, system modeling and simulation. Many interesting problems have been included throughout the book, and its contents will be beneficial for students and professionals in wide areas of interest

Investigation of the impact of fibre impairments and SOA-based devices on 2D-WH/TS OCDMA codes

In seeking efficient last-mile solutions for high-capacity, optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) emerges as a promising alternative high-speed optical network that can securely support a multitude of simultaneous users without requiring extensive equipment. This multiplexing technique has recently been the subject of comprehensive research, highlighting its potential for facilitating high-bandwidth multi-access networking. When contrasted with techniques such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and optical time division multiplexing (OTDM), OCDMA offers a more effective and equitable split of available fibre bandwidth among the users. This thesis presents my research focused on the incoherent OCDMA under the influence of optical fibre impairments that uses picosecond multiwavelength pulses to form two-dimensional wavelength hopping time-spreading (2D-WH/TS) incoherent OCDMA codes. In particular, self-phase modulation, temperature induced fibre dispersion, chromatic dispersion, as well as the impact of semiconductor optical amplifier SOA devices deployment on 2D-WH/TS OCDMA code integrity were investigated. These aspects were investigated using a 17-km long bidirectional fibre link between Strathclyde and Glasgow University. In particular, I investigated the impact of temporal skewing among OCDMA code carriers and the importance of selecting small range of wavelengths as code carriers where wide range manifest high dependency on wavelength. This wavelength dependency is exploited furthermore to measure the induced temperature dispersion coefficient accurately and economically. I have conducted experiments to characterise the impact of SOA-device on 2D OCDMA code carries which is evaluated under different bias conditions. This evaluation addressed the potential challenges and ramifications of the gain recovery time of SOA and its wavelength dependency with respect to gain ratio and self-phase modulation (SPM). The OCDMA code was built using multiplexers and delay lines to create a 2D OCDMA code to allow studying the impact of deploying a SOA under different conditions on each wavelength. The concept described above is then extended to the investigation of the SOA’s impact on a 2D-WH/TS OCDMA prime code under high bias current/gain conditions. The overall performance of two different 2D-WH/TS OCDMA systems deploying the SOA was also calculated. I have also investigated the possibility of manipulating chirp in 2D-WH/TS incoherent OCDMA to counteract the self-phase modulation-induced red shift by using single mode fibre and lithium crystals. I have investigated the performance of the picosecond code based optical signal when subjected to temperature variations similar to that experience by most buried fibre systems. I have proposed and demonstrated a novel technique, which I examined analytically and experimentally, that utilises a SOA at the transmitter to create a new code with a new wavelength hopping and spreading time sequences to achieve a unique physical improved secure incoherent OCDMA communication method. A novel fully automated tuneable compensation testbed is also proposed of an autonomous dispersion management in a WH/TS incoherent OCDMA system. The system proposed manipulates the chirp of OCDMA code carriers to limit chromatic dispersion detrimental effect on transmission systems.In seeking efficient last-mile solutions for high-capacity, optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) emerges as a promising alternative high-speed optical network that can securely support a multitude of simultaneous users without requiring extensive equipment. This multiplexing technique has recently been the subject of comprehensive research, highlighting its potential for facilitating high-bandwidth multi-access networking. When contrasted with techniques such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and optical time division multiplexing (OTDM), OCDMA offers a more effective and equitable split of available fibre bandwidth among the users. This thesis presents my research focused on the incoherent OCDMA under the influence of optical fibre impairments that uses picosecond multiwavelength pulses to form two-dimensional wavelength hopping time-spreading (2D-WH/TS) incoherent OCDMA codes. In particular, self-phase modulation, temperature induced fibre dispersion, chromatic dispersion, as well as the impact of semiconductor optical amplifier SOA devices deployment on 2D-WH/TS OCDMA code integrity were investigated. These aspects were investigated using a 17-km long bidirectional fibre link between Strathclyde and Glasgow University. In particular, I investigated the impact of temporal skewing among OCDMA code carriers and the importance of selecting small range of wavelengths as code carriers where wide range manifest high dependency on wavelength. This wavelength dependency is exploited furthermore to measure the induced temperature dispersion coefficient accurately and economically. I have conducted experiments to characterise the impact of SOA-device on 2D OCDMA code carries which is evaluated under different bias conditions. This evaluation addressed the potential challenges and ramifications of the gain recovery time of SOA and its wavelength dependency with respect to gain ratio and self-phase modulation (SPM). The OCDMA code was built using multiplexers and delay lines to create a 2D OCDMA code to allow studying the impact of deploying a SOA under different conditions on each wavelength. The concept described above is then extended to the investigation of the SOA’s impact on a 2D-WH/TS OCDMA prime code under high bias current/gain conditions. The overall performance of two different 2D-WH/TS OCDMA systems deploying the SOA was also calculated. I have also investigated the possibility of manipulating chirp in 2D-WH/TS incoherent OCDMA to counteract the self-phase modulation-induced red shift by using single mode fibre and lithium crystals. I have investigated the performance of the picosecond code based optical signal when subjected to temperature variations similar to that experience by most buried fibre systems. I have proposed and demonstrated a novel technique, which I examined analytically and experimentally, that utilises a SOA at the transmitter to create a new code with a new wavelength hopping and spreading time sequences to achieve a unique physical improved secure incoherent OCDMA communication method. A novel fully automated tuneable compensation testbed is also proposed of an autonomous dispersion management in a WH/TS incoherent OCDMA system. The system proposed manipulates the chirp of OCDMA code carriers to limit chromatic dispersion detrimental effect on transmission systems

Advancing iris biometric technology

PhD ThesisThe iris biometric is a well-established technology which is already in use in several nation-scale applications and it is still an active research area with several unsolved problems. This work focuses on three key problems in iris biometrics namely: segmentation, protection and cross-matching. Three novel methods in each of these areas are proposed and analyzed thoroughly. In terms of iris segmentation, a novel iris segmentation method is designed based on a fusion of an expanding and a shrinking active contour by integrating a new pressure force within the Gradient Vector Flow (GVF) active contour model. In addition, a new method for closed eye detection is proposed. The experimental results on the CASIA V4, MMU2, UBIRIS V1 and UBIRIS V2 databases show that the proposed method achieves state-of-theart results in terms of segmentation accuracy and recognition performance while being computationally more efficient. In this context, improvements by 60.5%, 42% and 48.7% are achieved in segmentation accuracy for the CASIA V4, MMU2 and UBIRIS V1 databases, respectively. For the UBIRIS V2 database, a superior time reduction is reported (85.7%) while maintaining a similar accuracy. Similarly, considerable time improvements by 63.8%, 56.6% and 29.3% are achieved for the CASIA V4, MMU2 and UBIRIS V1 databases, respectively. With respect to iris biometric protection, a novel security architecture is designed to protect the integrity of iris images and templates using watermarking and Visual Cryptography (VC). Firstly, for protecting the iris image, text which carries personal information is embedded in the middle band frequency region of the iris image using a novel watermarking algorithm that randomly interchanges multiple middle band pairs of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Secondly, for iris template protection, VC is utilized to protect the iii iris template. In addition, the integrity of the stored template in the biometric smart card is guaranteed by using the hash signatures. The proposed method has a minimal effect on the iris recognition performance of only 3.6% and 4.9% for the CASIA V4 and UBIRIS V1 databases, respectively. In addition, the VC scheme is designed to be readily applied to protect any biometric binary template without any degradation to the recognition performance with a complexity of only O(N). As for cross-spectral matching, a framework is designed which is capable of matching iris images in different lighting conditions. The first method is designed to work with registered iris images where the key idea is to synthesize the corresponding Near Infra-Red (NIR) images from the Visible Light (VL) images using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) while the second method is capable of working with unregistered iris images based on integrating the Gabor filter with different photometric normalization models and descriptors along with decision level fusion to achieve the cross-spectral matching. A significant improvement by 79.3% in cross-spectral matching performance is attained for the UTIRIS database. As for the PolyU database, the proposed verification method achieved an improvement by 83.9% in terms of NIR vs Red channel matching which confirms the efficiency of the proposed method. In summary, the most important open issues in exploiting the iris biometric are presented and novel methods to address these problems are proposed. Hence, this work will help to establish a more robust iris recognition system due to the development of an accurate segmentation method working for iris images taken under both the VL and NIR. In addition, the proposed protection scheme paves the way for a secure iris images and templates storage. Moreover, the proposed framework for cross-spectral matching will help to employ the iris biometric in several security applications such as surveillance at-a-distance and automated watch-list identification.Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Ira

A Joint Coding and Embedding Framework for Multimedia Fingerprinting

Technology advancement has made multimedia content widely available and easy to process. These benefits also bring ease to unauthorized users who can duplicate and manipulate multimedia content, and redistribute it to a large audience. Unauthorized distribution of information has posed serious threats to government and commercial operations. Digital fingerprinting is an emerging technology to protect multimedia content from such illicit redistribution by uniquely marking every copy of the content distributed to each user. One of the most powerful attacks from adversaries is collusion attack where several different fingerprinted copies of the same content are combined together to attenuate or even remove the fingerprints. An ideal fingerprinting system should be able to resist such collusion attacks and also have low embedding and detection computational complexity, and require low transmission bandwidth. To achieve aforementioned requirements, this thesis presents a joint coding and embedding framework by employing a code layer for efficient fingerprint construction and leveraging the embedding layer to achieve high collusion resistance. Based on this framework, we propose two new joint-coding-embedding techniques, namely, permuted subsegment embedding and group-based joint-coding-embedding fingerprinting. We show that the proposed fingerprinting framework provides an excellent balance between collusion resistance, efficient construction, and efficient detection. The proposed joint coding and embedding techniques allow us to model both coded and non-coded fingerprinting under the same theoretical model, which can be used to provide guidelines of choosing parameters. Based on the proposed joint coding and embedding techniques, we then consider real-world applications, such as DVD movie mass distribution and cable TV, and develop practical algorithms to fingerprint video in such challenging practical settings as to accommodate more than ten million users and resist hundreds of users' collusion. Our studies show a high potential of joint coding and embedding to meet the needs of real-world large-scale fingerprinting applications. The popularity of the subscription based content services, such as cable TV, inspires us to study the content protection in such scenario where users have access to multiple contents and thus the colluders may pirate multiple movie signals. To address this issue, we exploit the temporal dimension and propose a dynamic fingerprinting scheme that adjusts the fingerprint design based on the detection results of previously pirated signals. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed dynamic fingerprinting over conventional static fingerprinting. Other issues related to multimedia fingerprinting, such as fingerprinting via QIM embedding, are also discussed in this thesis