The Wiltshire Wills Feasibility Study

The Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office has nearly ninety thousand wills in its care. These records are neither adequately catalogued nor secured against loss by facsimile microfilm copies. With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund the Record Office has begun to produce suitable finding aids for the material. Beginning with this feasibility study the Record Office is developing a strategy to ensure the that facsimiles to protect the collection against risk of loss or damage and to improve public access are created.<p></p> This feasibility study explores the different methodologies that can be used to assist the preservation and conservation of the collection and improve public access to it. The study aims to produce a strategy that will enable the Record Office to create digital facsimiles of the Wills in its care for access purposes and to also create preservation quality microfilms. The strategy aims to seek the most cost effective and time efficient approach to the problem and identifies ways to optimise the processes by drawing on the experience of other similar projects. This report provides a set of guidelines and recommendations to ensure the best use of the resources available for to provide the most robust preservation strategy and to ensure that future access to the Wills as an information resource can be flexible, both local and remote, and sustainable

REAL-TIME VIDEO WATERMARKING FOR COPYRIGHT PROTECTION BASED ON HUMAN PERCEPTION

There is a need for real-time copyright logo insertion in emerging applications, such as Internet protocol television (IPTV). This situation arises in IP-TV and digital TV broadcasting when video residing in a server has to be broadcast by different stations and under different broadcasting rights. Embedded systems that are involved in broadcasting need to have embedded copyright protection. Existing works are targeted towards invisible watermarking, not useful for logo insertion. MPEG-4 is the mainstream exchangeable video format in the Internet today because it has higher and flexible compression rate, lower bit rate, and higher efficiency while superior visual quality.The main steps for MPEG-4 are color space conversion and sampling, DCT and its inverse (IDCT), quantization, zigzag scanning, motion estimation, and entropy coding. In this work a watermarking algorithm that performs the broadcaster\u27s logo insertion as watermark in the DCT domain is been presented. The robustness of DCT watermarking arises from the fact that if an attack tries to remove watermarking at mid frequencies, it will risk degrading the fidelity of the image\video because some perceptive details are at mid frequencies. The suggested methods has implemented in matlab

FPGA Prototyping of a Watermarking Algorithm for MPEG-4

In the immediate future, multimedia product distribution through the Internet will become main stream. However, it can also have the side effect of unauthorized duplication and distribution of multimedia products. That effect could be a critical challenge to the legal ownership of copyright and intellectual property. Many schemes have been proposed to address these issues; one is digital watermarking which is appropriate for image and video copyright protection. Videos distributed via the Internet must be processed by compression for low bit rate, due to bandwidth limitations. The most widely adapted video compression standard is MPEG-4. Discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain watermarking is a secure algorithm which could survive video compression procedures and, most importantly, attacks attempting to remove the watermark, with a visibly degraded video quality result after the watermark attacks. For a commercial broadcasting video system, real-time response is always required. For this reason, an FPGA hardware implementation is studied in this work. This thesis deals with video compression, watermarking algorithms and their hardware implementation with FPGAs. A prototyping VLSI architecture will implement video compression and watermarking algorithms with the FPGA. The prototype is evaluated with video and watermarking quality metrics. Finally, it is seen that the video qualities of the watermarking at the uncompressed vs. the compressed domain are only 1dB of PSNR lower. However, the cost of compressed domain watermarking is the complexity of drift compensation for canceling the drifting effect

Color image steganography in YCbCr space

Steganography is a best method for in secret communicating information during the transference of data. Images are an appropriate method that used in steganography can be used to protection the simple bits and pieces. Several systems, this one as color scale images steganography and grayscale images steganography, are used on color and store data in different techniques. These color images can have very big amounts of secret data, by using three main color modules. The different color modules, such as HSV-(hue, saturation, and value), RGB-(red, green, and blue), YCbCr-(luminance and chrominance), YUV, YIQ, etc. This paper uses unusual module to hide data: an adaptive procedure that can increase security ranks when hiding a top secret binary image in a RGB color image, which we implement the steganography in the YCbCr module space. We performed Exclusive-OR (XOR) procedures between the binary image and the RGB color image in the YCBCR module space. The converted byte stored in the 8-bit LSB is not the actual bytes; relatively, it is obtained by translation to another module space and applies the XOR procedure. This technique is practical to different groups of images. Moreover, we see that the adaptive technique ensures good results as the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and stands for mean square error (MSE) are good. When the technique is compared with our previous works and other existing techniques, it is shown to be the best in both error and message capability. This technique is easy to model and simple to use and provides perfect security with unauthorized

Combined robust and fragile watermarking algorithms for still images. Design and evaluation of combined blind discrete wavelet transform-based robust watermarking algorithms for copyright protection using mobile phone numbers and fragile watermarking algorithms for content authentication of digital still images using hash functions.

This thesis deals with copyright protection and content authentication for still images. New blind transform domain block based algorithms using one-level and two-level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) were developed for copyright protection. The mobile number with international code is used as the watermarking data. The robust algorithms used the Low-Low frequency coefficients of the DWT to embed the watermarking information. The watermarking information is embedded in the green channel of the RGB colour image and Y channel of the YCbCr images. The watermarking information is scrambled by using a secret key to increase the security of the algorithms. Due to the small size of the watermarking information comparing to the host image size, the embedding process is repeated several times which resulted in increasing the robustness of the algorithms. Shuffling process is implemented during the multi embedding process in order to avoid spatial correlation between the host image and the watermarking information. The effects of using one-level and two-level of DWT on the robustness and image quality have been studied. The Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Normalized Correlation Coefficient (NCC) are used to evaluate the fidelity of the images. Several grey and still colour images are used to test the new robust algorithms. The new algorithms offered better results in the robustness against different attacks such as JPEG compression, scaling, salt and pepper noise, Gaussian noise, filters and other image processing compared to DCT based algorithms. The authenticity of the images were assessed by using a fragile watermarking algorithm by using hash function (MD5) as watermarking information embedded in the spatial domain. The new algorithm showed high sensitivity against any tampering on the watermarked images. The combined fragile and robust watermarking caused minimal distortion to the images. The combined scheme achieved both the copyright protection and content authentication

The Applications of Discrete Wavelet Transform in Image Processing: A Review

This paper reviews the newly published works on applying waves to image processing depending on the analysis of multiple solutions. the wavelet transformation reviewed in detail including wavelet function, integrated wavelet transformation, discrete wavelet transformation, rapid wavelet transformation, DWT properties, and DWT advantages. After reviewing the basics of wavelet transformation theory, various applications of wavelet are reviewed and multi-solution analysis, including image compression, image reduction, image optimization, and image watermark. In addition, we present the concept and theory of quadruple waves for the future progress of wavelet transform applications and quadruple solubility applications. The aim of this paper is to provide a wide-ranging review of the survey found able on wavelet-based image processing applications approaches. It will be beneficial for scholars to execute effective image processing applications approaches

Tamper Localization Approach for Reversible Watermarking Algorithm Based on Histogram Bin Shifting

Reversible watermarking is a process which is used to authenticate the multimedia content. It checks the integrity of the digital data in order to recover the original data without any distortion. Industries like as medical services, military organization and legal services which are dealing the sensitive data where the minimal alteration is difficult to be tolerated is the application domain of Reversible watermarking. In this thesis, we have proposed a Tamper localization approach for histogram bin shifting based Reversible watermarking algorithm,where original image can be obtained from the watermarked image without any distortion. Tamper localization approach finds out the tampered region of the image, which is used for the selective rejection of the cover image. General application of reversible watermarking procedure says that the entire image gets rejected at receiver side due to the hash mismatch and authentication failure. By using our approach when the hash mismatch occurs the selected part of the image is rejected. This will reduce the re-transmission overhead on the communication channel and limited bandwidth is required due to small sub-part of re-transmission of the image. Here we are taking the advantage of the multiple minimum and maximum points of the histogram for embedding purpose. This will increase the embedding capacity. We have embedded the hash into smaller sub-part of the image until embedding is possible. The hash is generated through the some known cryptographic hash function such as SHA or MD5. This will help us to find out the tampered region at the receiver end while extracting the hash, in the case of hash mismatch occur in cover image which will lead to selective rejection of the cover images

Secure digital documents using Steganography and QR Code

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonWith the increasing use of the Internet several problems have arisen regarding the processing of electronic documents. These include content filtering, content retrieval/search. Moreover, document security has taken a centre stage including copyright protection, broadcast monitoring etc. There is an acute need of an effective tool which can find the identity, location and the time when the document was created so that it can be determined whether or not the contents of the document were tampered with after creation. Owing the sensitivity of the large amounts of data which is processed on a daily basis, verifying the authenticity and integrity of a document is more important now than it ever was. Unsurprisingly document authenticity verification has become the centre of attention in the world of research. Consequently, this research is concerned with creating a tool which deals with the above problem. This research proposes the use of a Quick Response Code as a message carrier for Text Key-print. The Text Key-print is a novel method which employs the basic element of the language (i.e. Characters of the alphabet) in order to achieve authenticity of electronic documents through the transformation of its physical structure into a logical structured relationship. The resultant dimensional matrix is then converted into a binary stream and encapsulated with a serial number or URL inside a Quick response Code (QR code) to form a digital fingerprint mark. For hiding a QR code, two image steganography techniques were developed based upon the spatial and the transform domains. In the spatial domain, three methods were proposed and implemented based on the least significant bit insertion technique and the use of pseudorandom number generator to scatter the message into a set of arbitrary pixels. These methods utilise the three colour channels in the images based on the RGB model based in order to embed one, two or three bits per the eight bit channel which results in three different hiding capacities. The second technique is an adaptive approach in transforming domain where a threshold value is calculated under a predefined location for embedding in order to identify the embedding strength of the embedding technique. The quality of the generated stego images was evaluated using both objective (PSNR) and Subjective (DSCQS) methods to ensure the reliability of our proposed methods. The experimental results revealed that PSNR is not a strong indicator of the perceived stego image quality, but not a bad interpreter also of the actual quality of stego images. Since the visual difference between the cover and the stego image must be absolutely imperceptible to the human visual system, it was logically convenient to ask human observers with different qualifications and experience in the field of image processing to evaluate the perceived quality of the cover and the stego image. Thus, the subjective responses were analysed using statistical measurements to describe the distribution of the scores given by the assessors. Thus, the proposed scheme presents an alternative approach to protect digital documents rather than the traditional techniques of digital signature and watermarking

Robust multi-view video streaming through adaptive intra refresh video transcoding

A multi-view video (MVV) transcoder has been designed. The objective is to deliver maximum quality 3D video data from the source to the 2D video destination, through a wireless communication channel using all of its available bandwidth. This design makes use of the spatial and view downscaling algorithm. The method involves the reuse of motion information obtained from both the reference frames and views. Consequently, highly compressed MVV is converted into low bit rate single view video that is compliant with H.264/AVC format. Adaptive intra refresh (AIR) error resilience tool is configured to mitigate the error propagation resulting from channel conditions. Experimental results indicate that error resilience plus transcoding performed better than the cascaded technique. Simulation results demonstrated an efficient 3D video streaming service applied to low power mobile devices