From OPIMA to MPEG IPMP-X: A standard's history across R&D projects

This paper describes the work performed by a number of companies and universities who have been working as a consortium under the umbrella of the European Union Framework Programme 5 (FP5), Information Society Technologies (IST) research program, in order to provide a set of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and architectures, aiming at helping to reduce the copyright circumvention risks, that have been threatening the music and film industries in their transition from the “analogue” to “digital” age. The paper starts by addressing some of the earlier standardization efforts in the DRM arena, namely, Open Platform Initiative for Multimedia Access (OPIMA). One of the described FP5 IST projects, Open Components for Controlled Access to Multimedia Material (OCCAMM), has developed the OPIMA vision. The paper addresses also the Motion Pictures Expert Group—MPEG DRM work, starting from the MPEG Intellectual Propriety Management and Protection—IPMP “Hooks”, towards the MPEG IPMP Extensions, which has originated the first DRM-related standard (MPEG-4 Part 13, called IPMP Extensions or IPMP-X) ever released by ISO up to the present days.2 The paper clarifies how the FP5 IST project MPEG Open Security for Embedded Systems (MOSES), has extended the OPIMA interfaces and architecture to achieve compliance with the MPEG IPMP-X standard, and how it has contributed to the achievement of “consensus” and to the specification, implementation (Reference Software) and validation (Conformance Testing) of the MPEG IPMP-X standard.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

iDRM - Interoperability Mechanisms for Open Rights Management Platforms

Today’s technology is raising important challenges in the Intellectual Property (IP) field in general and to Copyright in particular [Arkenbout et al., 2004]. The same technology that has made possible the access to content in a ubiquitous manner, available to everyone in a simple and fast way, is also the main responsible for the challenges affecting the digital content IP of our days [Chiariglione, 2000]. Technological solutions and legal frameworks were created to meet these new challenges. From the technological point of view, Rights Management Systems (RMS) and Copy Protection Systems (CPS) have been developed and deployed to try to cope with them. At first, they seemed to work however, their closed and non-interoperable nature and a growing number of wrong strategic business decisions, soon lead to a strong opposition. One of the strongest negative points is the lack of rights management interoperability [Geer, 2004]. The work presented on this thesis primarily addresses the RMS interoperability problems. The objective of the thesis is to present some possible mechanisms to improve the interoperability between the different existing and emerging rights management platforms [Guth, 2003a]. Several different possible directions to rights management interoperability are pointed in this thesis. One of the most important is openness. Interoperability between different rights management mechanisms can only be achieved if they are open up to a certain level. Based on this concept, an open rights management platform is designed and presented in this thesis. Also, some of the interoperability mechanisms are presented and explained. This platform makes usage of the emerging service-oriented architectures to provide a set of distributed rights management services. Rights management solutions rely heavily on the establishment of authenticated and trust environments between its different elements. While considering different RMS, the establishment of such trust environments can be somehow complex. This thesis provides a contribution to the establishment of interoperable RMS trust environments through the usage of Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) mechanisms. Modern rights management systems have to handle with both keying material and licenses which are used mostly to define how content is governed by the system. Managing this is a complex and hard task when different rights management solutions are considered. This thesis presents and describes a generic model to handle the key and license management life cycle, that can be used to establish a global interoperable management solution between different RMS

Platforms for handling and development of audiovisual data

Estágio realizado na MOG Solutions e orientado por Vítor TeixeiraTese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informátca e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Empirical studies of Quality of Experience (QoE) : A Systematic Literature Survey

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a relatively new phenomenon. The main focus of this thesis has been to conduct a systematic literature survey of research done in the field of QoE over a ten year period. The method, developed by A. Fink, has been used to survey empirical studies. A framework of QoE has been developed, which created the possibility of grouping together and analysing all the studies in a common framework. In total, 44 studies were analysed. 66 per cent of them were studies with human participants and 34 per cent of them were studies without human participants. The majority of the selected empirical studies have analysed the sub-aspect ‘satisfaction’. Among other vital sub-aspects, which were of interest to researches, were ‘usefulness’, ‘ease of use’, ‘communication’, ‘loss/packet loss’, ‘delay’, ‘bandwidth’, and ‘jitter’. The results of this survey show that different sub-aspects depend on different services. It is not enough that one sub-aspect functions very well, because most of sub-aspects are closely related to each other. Therefore, it is very important that sub-aspects, which are dependent on each other, are functioning as one group to achieve higher QoE on user experience. This thesis may contribute to deeper understanding of the phenomenon QoE. Knowledge of QoE can bring in new ideas and new possibilities for developing a new system or products for achieving satisfaction of user experience

Considering Bluetooth's Subband Codec (SBC) for Wideband Speech and Audio on the Internet

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has standardized the subband coding (SBC) audio codec to connect headphones via wireless Bluetooth links. SBC compresses audio at high fidelity while having an ultra-low algorithm delay. To make SBC suitable for the Internet, we extend it by using a time and packet loss concealment (PLC) algorithm that is based on ITU's G.711 Appendix I. The design is novel in the aspect of the interface between codec and speech receiver. We developed a new approach on how to distribute the functionality of a speech receiver between codec and application. Our approach leads to easier implementations of high quality VoIP applications. We conducted subjective and objective listening tests of the audio quality of SBC and PLC in order to determine an optimal coding mode and the trade-off between coding mode and packet loss rate. More precisely, we conducted MUSHRA listening tests for selected sample items. These tests results are then compared with the results of multiple objective assessment algorithms (ITU P.862 PESQ, ITU BS.1387-1 PEAQ, Creusere's algorithm). We found out that a combination of the PEAQ basic and advanced values best matches---after third order linear regression---the subjective MUSHRA results . The linear regression has coefficient of determination of R²=0.907². By comparison, our individual human ratings show a correlation of about R=0.9 compared to our averaged human rating results. Using the combination of both PEAQ algorithms, we calculate hundred thousands of objective audio quality ratings varying audio content and algorithmic parameters of SBC and PLC. The results show which set of parameters value are best suitable for a bandwidth and delay constrained link. The transmission quality of SBC is enhanced significantly by selecting optimal encoding parameters as compared to the default parameter sets given in the standard. Finally, we present preliminary objective tests results on the comparison of the audio codecs SBC, CELT, APT-X and ULD coding speech and audio transmission. They all allow a mono and stereo transmission of music at ultra-low coding delays (<10ms), which is especially useful for distributed ensemble performances over the Internet

Multimedia in mobile networks: Streaming techniques, optimization and User Experience

1.UMTS overview and User Experience 2.Streaming Service & Streaming Platform 3.Quality of Service 4.Mpeg-4 5.Test Methodology & testing architecture 6.Conclusion

The Proceedings of 15th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 5-6 December, 2017, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

Conference Foreword The annual Security Congress, run by the Security Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, includes the Australian Information Security and Management Conference. Now in its fifteenth year, the conference remains popular for its diverse content and mixture of technical research and discussion papers. The area of information security and management continues to be varied, as is reflected by the wide variety of subject matter covered by the papers this year. The papers cover topics from vulnerabilities in “Internet of Things” protocols through to improvements in biometric identification algorithms and surveillance camera weaknesses. The conference has drawn interest and papers from within Australia and internationally. All submitted papers were subject to a double blind peer review process. Twenty two papers were submitted from Australia and overseas, of which eighteen were accepted for final presentation and publication. We wish to thank the reviewers for kindly volunteering their time and expertise in support of this event. We would also like to thank the conference committee who have organised yet another successful congress. Events such as this are impossible without the tireless efforts of such people in reviewing and editing the conference papers, and assisting with the planning, organisation and execution of the conference. To our sponsors, also a vote of thanks for both the financial and moral support provided to the conference. Finally, thank you to the administrative and technical staff, and students of the ECU Security Research Institute for their contributions to the running of the conference

Towards Secure and Intelligent Diagnosis: Deep Learning and Blockchain Technology for Computer-Aided Diagnosis Systems

Cancer is the second leading cause of death across the world after cardiovascular disease. The survival rate of patients with cancerous tissue can significantly decrease due to late-stage diagnosis. Nowadays, advancements of whole slide imaging scanners have resulted in a dramatic increase of patient data in the domain of digital pathology. Large-scale histopathology images need to be analyzed promptly for early cancer detection which is critical for improving patient's survival rate and treatment planning. Advances of medical image processing and deep learning methods have facilitated the extraction and analysis of high-level features from histopathological data that could assist in life-critical diagnosis and reduce the considerable healthcare cost associated with cancer. In clinical trials, due to the complexity and large variance of collected image data, developing computer-aided diagnosis systems to support quantitative medical image analysis is an area of active research. The first goal of this research is to automate the classification and segmentation process of cancerous regions in histopathology images of different cancer tissues by developing models using deep learning-based architectures. In this research, a framework with different modules is proposed, including (1) data pre-processing, (2) data augmentation, (3) feature extraction, and (4) deep learning architectures. Four validation studies were designed to conduct this research. (1) differentiating benign and malignant lesions in breast cancer (2) differentiating between immature leukemic blasts and normal cells in leukemia cancer (3) differentiating benign and malignant regions in lung cancer, and (4) differentiating benign and malignant regions in colorectal cancer. Training machine learning models, disease diagnosis, and treatment often requires collecting patients' medical data. Privacy and trusted authenticity concerns make data owners reluctant to share their personal and medical data. Motivated by the advantages of Blockchain technology in healthcare data sharing frameworks, the focus of the second part of this research is to integrate Blockchain technology in computer-aided diagnosis systems to address the problems of managing access control, authentication, provenance, and confidentiality of sensitive medical data. To do so, a hierarchical identity and attribute-based access control mechanism using smart contract and Ethereum Blockchain is proposed to securely process healthcare data without revealing sensitive information to an unauthorized party leveraging the trustworthiness of transactions in a collaborative healthcare environment. The proposed access control mechanism provides a solution to the challenges associated with centralized access control systems and ensures data transparency and traceability for secure data sharing, and data ownership