Enhanced Speckle Filters For Sonar Images Using Stationary Wavelets And Hybrid Inter- And Intra Scale Wavelet Coefficient Dependency

The quality of Sonar images are often reduced by the presence of speckle noise. The presence of speckle noise leads to incorrect analysis and has to be handled carefully. In this paper, an improved non-parametric statistical wavelet denoising method is presented. The algorithm uses a stationary wavelet transformation to derive the wavelet coefficients, from which edge and non-edge wavelet coefficients are identified. Further to improve the time complexity, only homogenous regions with respect to coefficients of neighbors are considered. This method uses an ant colony classification technique. A hybrid method that exploits both inter-scale and intra-scale dependencies between wavelet coefficients is also proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient in terms of reduction in speckle noise and speed and can be efficiently used by various sonar imaging systems

Secure Authentication Watermarking for Binary Images

Authentication watermarking is the process that inserts hidden data into an object (image) in order to detect any fraudulent alteration perpetrated by a malicious hacker. In the literature, quite a small number of secure authentication methods are available for binary images. This paper proposes a new secure authentication watermarking method for binary images. It can detect any visually significant alteration while maintaining good visual quality. As usual, the security of the algorithm lies on the secrecy of a private-key. Only its owner can insert the correct watermark while anyone may verify the authenticity through the corresponding public-key. A possible application of the proposed technique is in internet fax transmission, i.e. for legal authentication of documents routed outside the phone network. 1