Object Alignment for Military Optical Surveillance

Electro-optical devices are increasingly used for military sea-, land- and air applications to detect, recognize and track objects. Typically, these devices produce video information that is presented to an operator. However, with increasing availability of electro-optical devices the data volume is becoming very large, creating a rising need for automated analysis. In a military setting, this typically involves detecting and recognizing objects at a large distance, i.e. when they are difficult to distinguish from background and noise. One may consider combining multiple images from a video stream into a single enhanced image that provides more information for the operator. In this paper we investigate a simple algorithm to enhance simulated images from a military context and investigate how the enhancement is affected by various types of disturbance.

RUPSec: An Extension on RUP for Developing Secure Systems - Requirements Discipline

The world is moving rapidly toward the deployment of information and communication systems. Nowadays, computing systems with their fast growth are found everywhere and one of the main challenges for these systems is increasing attacks and security threats against them. Thus, capturing, analyzing and verifying security requirements becomes a very important activity in development process of computing systems, specially in developing systems such as banking, military and e-business systems. For developing every system, a process model which includes a process, methods and tools is chosen. The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is one of the most popular and complete process models which is used by developers in recent years. This process model should be extended to be used in developing secure software systems. In this paper, the Requirement Discipline of RUP is extended to improve RUP for developing secure software systems. These proposed extensions are adding and integrating a number of Activities, Roles, and Artifacts to RUP in order to capture, document and model threats and security requirements of system. These extensions introduce a group of clear and stepwise activities to developers. By following these activities, developers assure that security requirements are captured and modeled. These models are used in design, implementation and test activitie

Continuous Feature Adaptation for Non-Native Speech Recognition

The current speech interfaces in many military applications may be adequate for native speakers. However, the recognition rate drops quite a lot for non-native speakers (people with foreign accents). This is mainly because the nonnative speakers have large temporal and intra-phoneme variations when they pronounce the same words. This problem is also complicated by the presence of large environmental noise such as tank noise, helicopter noise, etc. In this paper, we proposed a novel continuous acoustic feature adaptation algorithm for on-line accent and environmental adaptation. Implemented by incremental singular value decomposition (SVD), the algorithm captures local acoustic variation and runs in real-time. This feature-based adaptation method is then integrated with conventional model-based maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) algorithm. Extensive experiments have been performed on the NATO non-native speech corpus with baseline acoustic model trained on native American English. The proposed feature-based adaptation algorithm improved the average recognition accuracy by 15%, while the MLLR model based adaptation achieved 11% improvement. The corresponding word error rate (WER) reduction was 25.8% and 2.73%, as compared to that without adaptation. The combined adaptation achieved overall recognition accuracy improvement of 29.5%, and WER reduction of 31.8%, as compared to that without adaptation.

Comparison of Valuation Techniques for Bone Age Assessment

This comparison of valuation techniques for bone age assessment is a work carried out by the Telemedicine Research Group of the Military University - TIGUM, as a preliminary to the Design and development a treatment system of hand and wrist radiological images for children aged 0-6 years to bone age assessment . In this paper the techniques mentioned for decades have been the most widely used and the statistically significant. Althought, initially with the current project, it wants to work with children who have limit age, this comparison and evaluation techniques work will help in the future to expand the study subject in the system to bone age assessment, implementing more techniques, tools and deeper analysis to accomplish this purpose.

Artificial Neural Network based Web Application Firewall for SQL Injection

In recent years with the rapid development of Internet and the Web, more and more web applications have been deployed in many fields and organizations such as finance, military, and government. Together with that, hackers have found more subtle ways to attack web applications. According to international statistics, SQL Injection is one of the most popular vulnerabilities of web applications. The consequences of this type of attacks are quite dangerous, such as sensitive information could be stolen or authentication systems might be by-passed. To mitigate the situation, several techniques have been adopted. In this research, a security solution is proposed using Artificial Neural Network to protect web applications against this type of attacks. The solution has been experimented on sample datasets and has given promising result. The solution has also been developed in a prototypic web application firewall called ANNbWAF.

Neural Networks for Short Term Wind Speed Prediction

Predicting short term wind speed is essential in order to prevent systems in-action from the effects of strong winds. It also helps in using wind energy as an alternative source of energy, mainly for Electrical power generation. Wind speed prediction has applications in Military and civilian fields for air traffic control, rocket launch, ship navigation etc. The wind speed in near future depends on the values of other meteorological variables, such as atmospheric pressure, moisture content, humidity, rainfall etc. The values of these parameters are obtained from a nearest weather station and are used to train various forms of neural networks. The trained model of neural networks is validated using a similar set of data. The model is then used to predict the wind speed, using the same meteorological information. This paper reports an Artificial Neural Network model for short term wind speed prediction, which uses back propagation algorithm.

Motivated Support Vector Regression using Structural Prior Knowledge

It-s known that incorporating prior knowledge into support vector regression (SVR) can help to improve the approximation performance. Most of researches are concerned with the incorporation of knowledge in the form of numerical relationships. Little work, however, has been done to incorporate the prior knowledge on the structural relationships among the variables (referred as to Structural Prior Knowledge, SPK). This paper explores the incorporation of SPK in SVR by constructing appropriate admissible support vector kernel (SV kernel) based on the properties of reproducing kernel (R.K). Three-levels specifications of SPK are studied with the corresponding sub-levels of prior knowledge that can be considered for the method. These include Hierarchical SPK (HSPK), Interactional SPK (ISPK) consisting of independence, global and local interaction, Functional SPK (FSPK) composed of exterior-FSPK and interior-FSPK. A convenient tool for describing the SPK, namely Description Matrix of SPK is introduced. Subsequently, a new SVR, namely Motivated Support Vector Regression (MSVR) whose structure is motivated in part by SPK, is proposed. Synthetic examples show that it is possible to incorporate a wide variety of SPK and helpful to improve the approximation performance in complex cases. The benefits of MSVR are finally shown on a real-life military application, Air-toground battle simulation, which shows great potential for MSVR to the complex military applications.

Security Analysis of Password Hardened Multimodal Biometric Fuzzy Vault

Biometric techniques are gaining importance for personal authentication and identification as compared to the traditional authentication methods. Biometric templates are vulnerable to variety of attacks due to their inherent nature. When a person-s biometric is compromised his identity is lost. In contrast to password, biometric is not revocable. Therefore, providing security to the stored biometric template is very crucial. Crypto biometric systems are authentication systems, which blends the idea of cryptography and biometrics. Fuzzy vault is a proven crypto biometric construct which is used to secure the biometric templates. However fuzzy vault suffer from certain limitations like nonrevocability, cross matching. Security of the fuzzy vault is affected by the non-uniform nature of the biometric data. Fuzzy vault when hardened with password overcomes these limitations. Password provides an additional layer of security and enhances user privacy. Retina has certain advantages over other biometric traits. Retinal scans are used in high-end security applications like access control to areas or rooms in military installations, power plants, and other high risk security areas. This work applies the idea of fuzzy vault for retinal biometric template. Multimodal biometric system performance is well compared to single modal biometric systems. The proposed multi modal biometric fuzzy vault includes combined feature points from retina and fingerprint. The combined vault is hardened with user password for achieving high level of security. The security of the combined vault is measured using min-entropy. The proposed password hardened multi biometric fuzzy vault is robust towards stored biometric template attacks.

Representing Uncertainty in Computer-Generated Forces

The Integrated Performance Modelling Environment (IPME) is a powerful simulation engine for task simulation and performance analysis. However, it has no high level cognition such as memory and reasoning for complex simulation. This article introduces a knowledge representation and reasoning scheme that can accommodate uncertainty in simulations of military personnel with IPME. This approach demonstrates how advanced reasoning models that support similarity-based associative process, rule-based abstract process, multiple reasoning methods and real-time interaction can be integrated with conventional task network modelling to provide greater functionality and flexibility when modelling operator performance.