Shape and function from motion in biomedical imaging: part 3.

This third and last paper in this series is devoted to biological imaging, e.g nano and micro imaging. Although a number of concerns are shared when going to these scales, the conditions of observation, the objects under study and the problems to address make this research very challenging by the cautions that must be taken to control the experiments, a mandatory condition to get conclusive results and to infer sound conclusions

Color Image Analysis by Quaternion-Type Moments

International audienceIn this paper, by using the quaternion algebra, the conventional complex-type moments (CTMs) for gray-scale images are generalized to color images as quaternion-type moments (QTMs) in a holistic manner. We first provide a general formula of QTMs from which we derive a set of quaternion-valued QTM invariants (QTMIs) to image rotation, scale and translation transformations by eliminating the influence of transformation parameters. An efficient computation algorithm is also proposed so as to reduce computational complexity. The performance of the proposed QTMs and QTMIs are evaluated considering several application frameworks ranging from color image reconstruction, face recognition to image registration. We show they achieve better performance than CTMs and CTM invariants (CTMIs). We also discuss the choice of the unit pure quaternion influence with the help of experiments. appears to be an optimal choice

Fast Computation of Sliding Discrete Tchebichef Moments and Its Application in Duplicated Regions Detection

International audienceComputational load remains a major concern when processing signals by means of sliding transforms. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for the fast computation of one-dimensional and two-dimensional sliding discrete Tchebichef moments. To do so, we first establish the relationships that exist between the Tchebichef moments of two neighboring windows taking advantage of Tchebichef polynomials’ properties. We then propose an original way to fast compute the moments of one window by utilizing the moment values of its previous window. We further theoretically establish the complexity of our fast algorithm and illustrate its interest within the framework of digital forensics and more precisely the detection of duplicated regions in an audio signal or an image. Our algorithm is used to extract local features of such a signal tampering. Experimental results show that its complexity is independent of the window size, validating the theory. They also exhibit that our algorithm is suitable to digital forensics and beyond to any applications based on sliding Tchebichef moments

Protection of Relational Databases by Means of Watermarking: Recent Advances and Challenges

Databases represent today great economical and strategic concerns for both enterprises and public institutions. In that context, where data leaks, robbery as well as innocent or even hostile data degradation represent a real danger, and watermarking appears as an interesting tool. Watermarking is based on the imperceptible embedding of a message or watermark into a database in order, for instance, to determine its origin as well as to detect if it has been modified. A major advantage of watermarking in relation to other digital content protection mechanisms is that it leaves access to the data while keeping them protected by means of a watermark, independent of the data format storage. Nevertheless, it is necessary to ensure that the introduced distortion does not perturb the exploitation of the database. In this chapter, we give a general overview of the latest database watermarking methods, focusing on those dealing with distortion control. In particular, we present a recent technique based on an ontological modeling of the database semantics that represent the relationships in between attributes—relationships that should be preserved in order to avoid the appearance of incoherent and unlikely records

Robust hashing for image authentication using quaternion discrete Fourier transform and log-polar transform

International audienceIn this work, a novel robust image hashing scheme for image authentication is proposed based on the combination of the quaternion discrete Fourier transform (QDFT) with the log-polar transform. QDFT offers a sound way to jointly deal with the three channels of color images. The key features of the present method rely on (i) the computation of a secondary image using a log-polar transform; and (ii) the extraction from this image of low frequency QDFT coefficients' magnitude. The final image hash is generated according to the correlation of these magnitude coefficients and is scrambled by a secret key to enhance the system security. Experiments were conducted in order to analyze and identify the most appropriate parameter values of the proposed method and also to compare its performance to some reference methods in terms of receiver operating characteristics curves. The results show that the proposed scheme offers a good sensitivity to image content alterations and is robust to the common content-preserving operations, and especially to large angle rotation operations

An analysis of IEEE publications

INSPEC Accession Number:8979846This paper appears in: Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine, IEEE This study reports on a few elements of the scientific production of the IEEE. Other features could be displayed that would be interesting for a better understanding of the trajectories of the societies, journals, etc. The possibility of projecting new data onto the current spaces allows researchers to see if journals are static (the concepts and methods remaining stable) or dynamic (evolutions, ruptures can be tracked). In other words, this type of analysis can be used as a strategic tool to follow the impact and trends in engineering sciences. The fact that the authors concentrate on the IEEE publications prohibits any comparison with other societies publishing engineering papers. Such insights are feasible through the analysis of the INSPEC database. This could bring other clues on the coverage, the competition, and the reaction to new areas

Using digital watermarking to enhance security in wireless medical image transmission

This is the published version of the article. Copyright 2010 Mary Ann Liebert Inc.During the last few years, wireless networks have been increasingly used both inside hospitals and in patients’ homes to transmit medical information. In general, wireless networks suffer from decreased security. However, digital watermarking can be used to secure medical information. In this study, we focused on combining wireless transmission and digital watermarking technologies to better secure the transmission of medical images within and outside the hospital. Methods: We utilized an integrated system comprising the wireless network and the digital watermarking module to conduct a series of tests. Results: The test results were evaluated by medical consultants. They concluded that the images suffered no visible quality degradation and maintained their diagnostic integrity. Discussion: The proposed integrated system presented reasonable stability, and its performance was comparable to that of a fixed network. This system can enhance security during the transmission of medical images through a wireless channel.The General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Hellenic Ministry of Development and the British Council

3D nonrigid medical image registration using a new information theoretic measure.

International audienceThis work presents a novel method for the nonrigid registration of medical images based on the Arimoto entropy, a generalization of the Shannon entropy. The proposed method employed the Jensen-Arimoto divergence measure as a similarity metric to measure the statistical dependence between medical images. Free-form deformations were adopted as the transformation model and the Parzen window estimation was applied to compute the probability distributions. A penalty term is incorporated into the objective function to smooth the nonrigid transformation. The goal of registration is to optimize an objective function consisting of a dissimilarity term and a penalty term, which would be minimal when two deformed images are perfectly aligned using the limited memory BFGS optimization method, and thus to get the optimal geometric transformation. To validate the performance of the proposed method, experiments on both simulated 3D brain MR images and real 3D thoracic CT data sets were designed and performed on the open source elastix package. For the simulated experiments, the registration errors of 3D brain MR images with various magnitudes of known deformations and different levels of noise were measured. For the real data tests, four data sets of 4D thoracic CT from four patients were selected to assess the registration performance of the method, including ten 3D CT images for each 4D CT data covering an entire respiration cycle. These results were compared with the normalized cross correlation and the mutual information methods and show a slight but true improvement in registration accuracy

Medical image integrity control combining digital signature and lossless watermarking

International audienceEnforcing protection of medical content becomes a major issue of computer security. Since medical contents are more and more widely distributed, it is necessary to develop security mechanism to guarantee their confidentiality, integrity and traceability in an autonomous way. In this context, watermarking has been recently proposed as a complementary mechanism for medical data protection. In this paper, we focus on the verification of medical image integrity through the combination of digital signatures with such a technology, and especially with Reversible Watermarking (RW). RW schemes have been proposed for images of sensitive content for which any modification may aspect their interpretation. Whence, we compare several recent RW schemes and discuss their potential use in the framework of an integrity control process in application to different sets of medical images issued from three distinct modalities: Magnetic Resonance Images, Positron Emission Tomography and Ultrasound Imaging. Experimental results with respect to two aspects including data hiding capacity and image quality preservation, show different limitations which depend on the watermark approach but also on image modality specificities