Selection of Robust Features for Coin Recognition and Counterfeit Coin Detection

Tremendous numbers of coins have been used in our daily life since ancient times. Aside from being a medium of goods and services, coins are items most collected worldwide. Simultaneously to the increasing number of coins in use, the number of counterfeit coins released into circulation is on the rise. Some countries have started to take different security measures to detect and eliminate counterfeit coins. However, the current measures are very expensive and ineffective such as the case in UK which recently decided to replace the whole coin design and release a new coin incorporating a set of security features. The demands of a cost effective and robust computer-aided system to classify and authenticate those coins have increased as a result. In this thesis, the design and implementation of coin recognition and counterfeit coin detection methods are proposed. This involves studying different coin stamp features and analyzing the sets of features that can uniquely and precisely differentiate coins of different countries and reject counterfeit coins. In addition, a new character segmentation method crafted for characters from coin images is proposed in this thesis. The proposed method for character segmentation is independent of the language of those characters. The experiments were performed on different coins with various characters and languages. The results show the effectiveness of the method to extract characters from different coins. The proposed method is the first to address character segmentation from coins. Coin recognition has been investigated in several research studies and different features have been selected for that purpose. This thesis proposes a new coin recognition method that focuses on small parts of the coin (characters) instead of extracting features from the whole coin image as proposed by other researchers. The method is evaluated on coins from different countries having different complexities, sizes, and qualities. The experimental results show that the proposed method compares favorably with other methods, and requires lower computational costs. Counterfeit coin detection is more challenging than coin recognition where the differences between genuine and counterfeit coins are much smaller. The high quality forged coins are very similar to genuine coins, yet the coin stamp features are never identical. This thesis discusses two counterfeit coin detection methods based on different features. The first method consists of an ensemble of three classifiers, where a fine-tuned convolutional neural network is used to extract features from coins to train two classifiers. The third classifier is trained on features extracted from textual area of the coin. On the other hand, sets of edge-based measures are used in the second method. Those measures are used to track differences in coin stamp’s edges between the test coin and a set of reference coins. A binary classifier is then trained based on the results of those measures. Finally, a series of experimental evaluation and tests have been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of these proposed methods, and they show that promising results have been achieved

Area efficient test circuit for library standard cell qualification

High cost of qualifying library standard cells on silicon wafer limits the number of test circuits on the test chip. This paper proposes a technique to share common load circuits among test circuits to reduce the silicon area. By enabling the load sharing, number of transistors for the common load can be reduced significantly. Results show up to 80% reduction in silicon area due to load area reduction

Cost-efficient standard cell library timing and power validation techniques

A standard cell library contains functional blocks with known electrical characteristics,which are characterized to obtain the following parameters: propagation delay, output transition time, power representation, and capacitance. Standard cell libraries are widely applied by industry designers to the implementation of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs. Such application is facilitated by the provision of extremely high gate density and excellent electrical performance. Early validation of the characterization data for the standard cells on physical silicon is required to guarantee the correct implementation of the final design in silicon functions. The silicon validation processes correlate the characterized values with the actual silicon performance. However, this process is costly in terms of design and fabrication. Moreover, testing the process on wafer silicon measurement validation is difficult in terms of test time and because of equipment limitation. In this research, an enhanced silicon validation method was developed to validate the libraries using the basics of the delay chain technique. The method was tested by applying two new approaches to designing test element group (TEG) circuits. These two approaches are sharing load between multi-chains and input control for multi-input gates. These proposed methods can reduce the cost of fabrication through total silicon area reduction of the test chip achieved by decreasing the total number of transistors required in the design. The total number of I/O PADs required in the validation process can also be reduced, and the test time can be enhanced. The effectiveness of our proposed approaches was evaluated on several test chips that consist of an inverter, a multi-input NAND, and NOR gates as basic cells of combinational logic circuits in the library. Test chips were designed to verify the functionality of the design and to validate timing delays and dynamic and leakage power, which are influenced by cell output loading and cell input transition parameters. The test chip was tested at operating environments that match simulation corners to cover datasheet-specified operating conditions

Investigate the Capability of Applying Hidden Data in Text File: An Overview

The aim of this study is to investigate the methods of steganography using the text file as a cover carrier. The hiding data or Steganography is the art of protecting the information by embedding data in medium carrier, for instants this study illustrates historically this art. The steganography technique has been used mainly to hide secret data within multimedia files and one of used files to hide secret data is the text files. In this study, we have proposed the steganography methods using the text files as a review. The study restricts the weak points of this art by hiding information in text file. As a result of this study, the text based steganography has been discussed and the advantages and disadvantages of using the text file as a cover carrier for steganography has been proposed. © 2010 Asian Network for Scientific Information

An overview: Theoretical and mathematical perspectives for advance Encryption standard/Rijndael

With the quick development of various multimedia technologies, more and more multimedia data are generated and transmitted in the medical, also the internet allows for wide distribution of digital media data. It becomes much easier to edit, modify and duplicate digital information. Besides that, digital documents are also easy to copy and distribute, therefore it will be faced by many threats. It is a big security and privacy issue, it become necessary to find appropriate protection because of the significance, accuracy and sensitivity of the information, which may include some sensitive information which should not be accessed by or can only be partially exposed to the general users. Therefore, security and privacy has become an important. Another problem with digital document and video is that undetectable modifications can be made with very simple and widely available equipment, which put the digital material for evidential purposes under question. Cryptography considers one of the techniques which used to protect the important information. In this study a theoretical and mathematical perspectives for Advance Encryption Standard (AES)/Rijndael of multimedia encryption schemes have been proposed in the literature and description. This overview for advance encryption standard achieving a flexibility and uncomplicated handle with this algorithm, which is a challenge of researchers when be used as implementation. © 2010 Asian Network for Scientific Information