Information technology in future education: open and distance learning

Globalization challenges the developing countries to catch up and to set up a institutionalize a system of educational planning that will produce skilled manpower and knowledge workers required for today and future. The introduction of information technology and communication are enhancing the delivery of education, changing the roles of students and teachers, and producing a shift in society from industrialization towards an information-based society. These changes had profound effects upon a broad spectrum of knowledge leading to suggestions of a new form of cultural. Some Universities in the world have developed open universities, employing audio and video tapes, television, satellites, teleconferencing, and telephone tutors. The future of countries often lies within their ability to compete in a global market where industrial based economies are giving way to knowledge based industries, realizing the importance of knowledge, skills and the intellectual capacity to meet the challenges of accelerated change and uncertainty. By means of information technology, education can thus be made available to the students where are located in different places at any time. As a result, education in this way can be unlimited. The exams and grades are gradually becoming available through electronic means and notebooks are starting to give way to laptops. Also, students can be examined through computer managed learning systems and do tutorial exercises on a computer rather than in a classroom. Subsequently, information technology is foreseeing a change in the education environment towards a reliance on electronic sources to deliver materia

Health monitoring system using pulse oximeter with remote alert

This A remote patient monitoring system is implemented which is used for real time monitoring of various heath parameters of a remotely based patient. Oxygen saturation and body temperature are the two parameters calculated and transmitted via a server to a remote client. The main purpose of this paper is to present a remote Pulse Oximetry System for health monitoring purposes. The framework lays on the idea that the vital health signs, can be collected from the patient and passed to a processer, where these signs will be processed, compared and monitored in order to alert important personnel in the case of an emergency. The blood oxygen saturation is the biometric sign which is monitored by this device .The technique used in this work is called “Photoplethysmography” which is based on the change in the intensity of light transmitted through the tissue due to arterial blood pulse. This technique converts the intensity of light into a voltage signal which is used to calculate the oxygen saturation of the patient. This is due to the fact that oxygenated blood has such characteristics in absorbing the Red and Infrared wavelengths which differs from the deoxygenated blood. Comparison of the two absorptions produces an estimation of the oxygen saturation in the patient’s blood

Wavelet coding design for image data compression

In this paper, image compression algorithms using scalar and ventor quantisation are proposed. An analysis of wavelet coefficients encoding is explained. Wavelet capability of energy compaction is shown. Also, wavelet ventor quantisation multiresolution codebook generation is discussed. General discription of the proposed image compression algorithm with its feature is presented. In addition, simulation results and comparison with other coders is shown

Applications of digital watermarking : current and future trends

A digital watermark is a secret key dependant signal inserted into digital data (images, sound,texts) and which can be later detected/extracted in order to make an assertion about the data. Technically, the digital watermark is represented as a kind of 'natural' noise. The identification information is encoded into the original unwatermarked data by adding more 'natural' noise and/or rearranging existing noise. The locations for embedding the watermark as well as the value of the watermark are determined by secret element

State-of-the-art digital watermarking attacks

Digital watermarking is a huge research area which is progressively growing. It covers theoretical studies. novel techniques, attacks and performance analysis. An embedded watermark may unintentionally or inadvel1ently be impaired by such processing. Other types of processing may be applied with the explicit goal of hindering watermark reception. In watermarking tern1inology, an "attack" is any processing that may impair detection of the watermark or communication of the information conveyed by the watermark. Broadly it can be classified as Intentional Attacks and Non-Intentional Attack

Digital watermarking : an overview

Digital watermarking has been inspired from security concerns over multimedia contents due to the advances of computer technology. Nowadays, it is easy to obtain, manipulate, distribute and store these contents due to evolution of Internet, excellent multimedia tools and low-cost storage devices. Research community and industry has shown extensive interests in developing and implementing possible solutions via digital watermarking. Digital watermarking can be defined as the process of embedding a certain piece of information (technically known as watermark) into multimedia content including text documents, images, audio or video streams, where the watermark can be detected or extracted later to make an assertion about the data [1]. A generalized watermark model consists of watermark encoding and detection processes as shown in Figure 14.1 and Figure 14.2 [2]. The inputs to the embedding process are the watern1ark, the cover object and a secret key. The key is used to enforce security and to protect the watermark. The output of the watermarking scheme is the watermarked data. The channel for the watermarked data could be a lossy, noisy, unreliable channel. Thus the received data may be different from the original watermarked data. The inputs for extraction are the received watermarked data and the key corresponding to the embedding key. The output of the watermark recovery process is the recovered wa

Image and coding techniques

The visual communication has reached a point of becoming a lively area in this new era. The main challenge for implementing video communication system is accessible bandwidth of the network. Usually this necessary bandwidth is not enough for the deployment of enormous amount of video dat

Digital watermarking techniques and methodologies

Digital watermarking is a huge research area which is progressively growing. It covers theoretical studies. novel techniques, attacks and performance analysis. Over the years, the digital watermarking community has focused on developing new techniques for watermark embedding and detection. Analysis of these techniques leads to methods for attacks and countermeasures which are used to discover faults and limitations in applications, encouraging the development of better ones. Digital watermarking is distinctive depending on its techniques and applications. The location of watermark embedding determines two kinds of methods:- The spatial domain methods embed watermark information directly into images pixels. On the other hand, the frequency domain methods embed watelmark information in the transform domain. The general approach used in these methods is to divide the image into blocks. Each block is mapped into the transform domain using either the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) [9], the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), or the Wavelet Transform. Embedding the watermark in the frequency domain can provide more robustness than in the spatial domain. It is strong against attacks like compression where spatial domain is not. Image watermarking techniques can be distinguished according to the way the watermark is revealed from the watermarked image. One way is by comparing this image to the original one, while the other doesn't resort to this comparison. The second are usually refen'ed to as blind watermarking techniques and are preferable

Imperceptibility and robustness analysis of DWT-based digital image watermarking

Digital watermarking is distinctive depending on the techniques used and its intended applications. This paper concentrates on invisible digital image watermarking using discrete wavelet transform. The work flow involves watermark embedding, attacks and watermark extraction. Two methods are proposed and analyzed to imply the imperceptibility and robustness, among the most important criteria of digital watermarking, using three types of attacks – JPEG compression, blurring and histogram equalization. The results are compared through subjective visual inspections and calculative measurements using PSNR for watermark imperceptibility and SSIM Index for watermark robustness