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

Robustness of Cosmological Simulations I: Large Scale Structure

The gravitationally-driven evolution of cold dark matter dominates the formation of structure in the Universe over a wide range of length scales. While the longest scales can be treated by perturbation theory, a fully quantitative understanding of nonlinear effects requires the application of large-scale particle simulation methods. Additionally, precision predictions for next-generation observations, such as weak gravitational lensing, can only be obtained from numerical simulations. In this paper, we compare results from several N-body codes using test problems and a diverse set of diagnostics, focusing on a medium resolution regime appropriate for studying many observationally relevant aspects of structure formation. Our conclusions are that -- despite the use of different algorithms and error-control methodologies -- overall, the codes yield consistent results. The agreement over a wide range of scales for the cosmological tests is test-dependent. In the best cases, it is at the 5% level or better, however, for other cases it can be significantly larger than 10%. These include the halo mass function at low masses and the mass power spectrum at small scales. While there exist explanations for most of the discrepancies, our results point to the need for significant improvement in N-body errors and their understanding to match the precision of near-future observations. The simulation results, including halo catalogs, and initial conditions used, are publicly available.Comment: 32 pages, 53 figures, data from the simulations is available at http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/heitmann/arxiv, accepted for publication in ApJS, several minor revisions, reference added, main conclusions unchange

Quasi-orthogonal space-frequency coding in non-coherent cooperative broadband networks

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.So far, complex valued orthogonal codes have been used differentially in cooperative broadband networks. These codes however achieve less than unitary code rate when utilized in cooperative networks with more than two relays. Therefore, the main challenge is how to construct unitary rate codes for non-coherent cooperative broadband networks with more than two relays while exploiting the achievable spatial and frequency diversity. In this paper, we extend full rate quasi-orthogonal codes to differential cooperative broadband networks where channel information is unavailable. From this, we propose a generalized differential distributed quasi-orthogonal space-frequency coding (DQSFC) protocol for cooperative broadband networks. Our proposed scheme is able to achieve full rate, and full spatial and frequency diversity in cooperative networks with any number of relays. Through pairwise error probability analysis we show that the diversity gain of our scheme can be improved by appropriate code construction and sub-carrier allocation. Based on this, we derive sufficient conditions for the proposed code structure at the source node and relay nodes to achieve full spatial and frequency diversity.Peer reviewe

Investigation of punctured LDPC codes and time-diversity on free-space optical links

In this paper, we analyze the behavior of DVB-S2 un-punctured/punctured low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded on-off-keying (OOK) under atmospheric turbulence conditions by utilizing time diversity. A performance characterization between these schemes is evaluated, where punctured LDPC code provides a penalty of around 0.1 to 0.2 dB against unpunctured LDPC codes but still provides a coding gain of several dB against uncoded OOK. The combination of channel coding and a bit interleaver results in performance improvements in turbulence conditions. For example, such a system can achieve a coding gain of 16.7 dB in moderate turbulence conditions compared to uncoded OOK

Correlation Flow: Robust Optical Flow Using Kernel Cross-Correlators

Robust velocity and position estimation is crucial for autonomous robot navigation. The optical flow based methods for autonomous navigation have been receiving increasing attentions in tandem with the development of micro unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper proposes a kernel cross-correlator (KCC) based algorithm to determine optical flow using a monocular camera, which is named as correlation flow (CF). Correlation flow is able to provide reliable and accurate velocity estimation and is robust to motion blur. In addition, it can also estimate the altitude velocity and yaw rate, which are not available by traditional methods. Autonomous flight tests on a quadcopter show that correlation flow can provide robust trajectory estimation with very low processing power. The source codes are released based on the ROS framework.Comment: 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018

Evaluation of cross-layer reliability mechanisms for satellite digital multimedia broadcast

This paper presents a study of some reliability mechanisms which may be put at work in the context of Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (SDMB) to mobile devices such as handheld phones. These mechanisms include error correcting codes, interleaving at the physical layer, erasure codes at intermediate layers and error concealment on the video decoder. The evaluation is made on a realistic satellite channel and takes into account practical constraints such as the maximum zapping time and the user mobility at several speeds. The evaluation is done by simulating different scenarii with complete protocol stacks. The simulations indicate that, under the assumptions taken here, the scenario using highly compressed video protected by erasure codes at intermediate layers seems to be the best solution on this kind of channel