Gravitational Radiation from First-Order Phase Transitions

It is believed that first-order phase transitions at or around the GUT scale will produce high-frequency gravitational radiation. This radiation is a consequence of the collisions and coalescence of multiple bubbles during the transition. We employ high-resolution lattice simulations to numerically evolve a system of bubbles using only scalar fields, track the anisotropic stress during the process and evolve the metric perturbations associated with gravitational radiation. Although the radiation produced during the bubble collisions has previously been estimated, we find that the coalescence phase enhances this radiation even in the absence of a coupled fluid or turbulence. We comment on how these simulations scale and propose that the same enhancement should be found at the Electroweak scale; this modification should make direct detection of a first-order electroweak phase transition easier.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Scrambling for Video Surveillance with Privacy

In this paper, we address the problem of scrambling regions of interest in a video sequence for the purpose of preserving privacy in video surveillance. We propose an efficient solution based on transform-domain scrambling. More specifically, the sign of selected transform coefficients is pseudo-randomly flipped during encoding. We address more specifically the two cases of MPEG-4 and Motion JPEG 2000. Simulation results show that the technique can be successfully applied to conceal information in regions of interest in the scene while providing with a good level of security. Furthermore, the scrambling is flexible and allows adjusting the amount of distortion introduced. Finally, this is achieved with a small impact on coding performance and negligible computational complexity increase

Scrambling for Anonymous Visual Communications

In this paper, we present a system for anonymous visual communications. Target application is an anonymous video chat. The system is identifying faces in the video sequence by means of face detection or skin detection. The corresponding regions are subsequently scrambled. We investigate several approaches for scrambling, either in the image-domain or in the transform-domain. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed system

Recent Advances in MPEG-7 Cameras

We propose a smart camera which performs video analysis and generates an MPEG-7 compliant stream. By producing a content-based metadata description of the scene, the MPEG-7 camera extends the capabilities of conventional cameras. The metadata is then directly interpretable by a machine. This is especially helpful in a number of applications such as video surveillance, augmented reality and quality control. As a use case, we describe an algorithm to identify moving objects and produce the corresponding MPEG-7 description. The algorithm runs in real-time on a Matrox Iris P300C camera

Motion JPEG 2000 for Wireless Applications

In this paper, we analyze the performance of Motion JPEG2000 for wireless applications. This new standard is based on intra-frame wavelet coding. Motion JPEG2000 is offering a number of very compelling advantages when compared to state-of-the-art MPEG-4 video coding. Wavelet coding achieves very high coding efficiency. Furthermore, because frames are intra coded, it is very error-resilient. Finally, Motion JPEG2000 requires low complexity, supports very efficient scalability, and introduces minimal coding delay. In this paper, we propose an analysis of the performance of Motion JPEG2000 and a comparison with MPEG-4 in terms of coding efficiency, error resilience and complexity. We present experimental results which show that Motion JPEG2000 outperforms MPEG-4 for wireless applications

Error-Resilient Video Coding Performance Analysis of Motion JPEG 2000 and MPEG-4

The new Motion JPEG 2000 standard is providing with some compelling features. It is based on an intra-frame wavelet coding, which makes it very well suited for wireless applications. Indeed, the state-of-the-art wavelet coding scheme achieves very high coding efficiency. In addition, Motion JPEG 2000 is very resilient to transmission errors as frames are coded independently (intra coding). Furthermore, it requires low complexity and introduces minimal coding delay. Finally, it supports very efficient scalability. In this paper, we analyze the performance of Motion JPEG 2000 in error-prone transmission. We compare it to the well-known MPEG-4 video coding scheme, in terms of coding efficiency, error resilience and complexity. We present experimental results which show that Motion JPEG 2000 outperforms MPEG-4 in the presence of transmission errors

Region-Based Transform-Domain Video Scrambling

In this paper, we address the problem of scrambling regions of interest in a video sequence. We target applications such as video surveillance preserving privacy, anonymous video communications, or TV news safeguarding the anonymity of a source. We propose an efficient solution based on transform-domain scrambling. More specifically, the sign of selected transform coefficients is flipped during encoding. We address the two cases of Motion JPEG 2000 and MPEG-4. Simulation results show that it can be successfully applied to conceal information in regions of interest in the scene while providing with a good level of security. Furthermore, the scrambling is flexible and allows adjusting the amount of distortion introduced. Finally, this is achieved with a small impact on coding performance and negligible computational complexity increase

Study of gravitational radiation from cosmic domain walls

In this paper, following the previous study, we evaluate the spectrum of gravitational wave background generated by domain walls which are produced if some discrete symmetry is spontaneously broken in the early universe. We apply two different methods to calculate the gravitational wave spectrum: One is to calculate the gravitational wave spectrum directly from numerical simulations, and another is to calculate it indirectly by estimating the unequal time anisotropic stress power spectrum of the scalar field. Both analysises indicate that the slope of the spectrum changes at two characteristic frequencies corresponding to the Hubble radius at the decay of domain walls and the width of domain walls, and that the spectrum between these two characteristic frequencies becomes flat or slightly red tilted. The second method enables us to evaluate the GW spectrum semi-analytically for the frequencies which can not be resolved in the finite box lattice simulations, but relies on the assumptions for the unequal time correlations of the source.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures; revised version of the manuscript, accepted for publication in JCA

Gravitational Radiation from Preheating with Many Fields

Parametric resonances provide a mechanism by which particles can be created just after inflation. Thus far, attention has focused on a single or many inflaton fields coupled to a single scalar field. However, generically we expect the inflaton to couple to many other relativistic degrees of freedom present in the early universe. Using simulations in an expanding Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker spacetime, in this paper we show how preheating is affected by the addition of multiple fields coupled to the inflaton. We focus our attention on gravitational wave production--an important potential observational signature of the preheating stage. We find that preheating and its gravitational wave signature is robust to the coupling of the inflaton to more matter fields.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, v2 submission version, thank you for comments

Image Replica Detection based on Binary Support Vector Classifier

In this paper, we present a system for image replica detection. More specifically, the technique is based on the extraction of 162 features corresponding to texture, color and gray-level characteristics. These features are then weighted and statistically normalized. To improve training and performances, the features space dimensionality is reduced. Lastly, a decision function is generated to classify the test image as replica or non-replica of a given reference image. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed system. Target applications include search for copyright infringement (e.g. variations of copyrighted images) and illicit content (e.g. pedophile images)