A review on medicinal properties of saffron toward major diseases

The stigma of Crocus sativus, known as saffron, is one of the most expensive spices in the world. The bioactive components in saffron, picrocrocin, crocin, and safranal, have demonstrated a wide range of uses and capabilities in the medical field. This review is focused on the potential therapeutic applications of saffron on diabetes mellitus (DM), antitumor, anticancer, anti-depressant, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), cardiovascular disease (CVD), erectile dysfunction and antibacterial effects

Color-decoupled photo response non-uniformity for digital image forensics

The last few years have seen the use of photo response non-uniformity noise (PRNU), a unique fingerprint of imaging sensors, in various digital forensic applications such as source device identification, content integrity verification and authentication. However, the use of a colour filter array for capturing only one of the three colour components per pixel introduces colour interpolation noise, while the existing methods for extracting PRNU provide no effective means for addressing this issue. Because the artificial colours obtained through the colour interpolation process is not directly acquired from the scene by physical hardware, we expect that the PRNU extracted from the physical components, which are free from interpolation noise, should be more reliable than that from the artificial channels, which carry interpolation noise. Based on this assumption we propose a Couple-Decoupled PRNU (CD-PRNU) extraction method, which first decomposes each colour channel into 4 sub-images and then extracts the PRNU noise from each sub-image. The PRNU noise patterns of the sub-images are then assembled to get the CD-PRNU. This new method can prevent the interpolation noise from propagating into the physical components, thus improving the accuracy of device identification and image content integrity verification

Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

Reversible watermarking scheme with image-independent embedding capacity

Permanent distortion is one of the main drawbacks of all the irreversible watermarking schemes. Attempts to recover the original signal after the signal passing the authentication process are being made starting just a few years ago. Some common problems, such as salt-and-pepper artefacts owing to intensity wraparound and low embedding capacity, can now be resolved. However, some significant problems remain unsolved. First, the embedding capacity is signal-dependent, i.e., capacity varies significantly depending on the nature of the host signal. The direct impact of this is compromised security for signals with low capacity. Some signals may be even non-embeddable. Secondly, while seriously tackled in irreversible watermarking schemes, the well-known problem of block-wise dependence, which opens a security gap for the vector quantisation attack and transplantation attack, are not addressed by researchers of the reversible schemes. This work proposes a reversible watermarking scheme with near-constant signal-independent embedding capacity and immunity to the vector quantisation attack and transplantation attack

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