A Way of Converting Color Images to Gray Scale Ones for the Color Blinds -Reducing the Colors for Tokyo Subway Map-

We proposes a way of removing noises and reducing the number of colors contained in a JPEG image. Main purpose of this project is to convert color images to monochrome images for the color blinds. We treat the crispy color images like the Tokyo subway map. Each color in the image has an important information. But for the color blinds, similar colors cannot be distinguished. If we can convert those colors to different gray values, they can distinguish them.

Detection of Breast Cancer in the JPEG2000 Domain

Breast cancer detection techniques have been reported to aid radiologists in analyzing mammograms. We note that most techniques are performed on uncompressed digital mammograms. Mammogram images are huge in size necessitating the use of compression to reduce storage/transmission requirements. In this paper, we present an algorithm for the detection of microcalcifications in the JPEG2000 domain. The algorithm is based on the statistical properties of the wavelet transform that the JPEG2000 coder employs. Simulation results were carried out at different compression ratios. The sensitivity of this algorithm ranges from 92% with a false positive rate of 4.7 down to 66% with a false positive rate of 2.1 using lossless compression and lossy compression at a compression ratio of 100:1, respectively.

A Talking Head System for Korean Text

A talking head system (THS) is presented to animate the face of a speaking 3D avatar in such a way that it realistically pronounces the given Korean text. The proposed system consists of SAPI compliant text-to-speech (TTS) engine and MPEG-4 compliant face animation generator. The input to the THS is a unicode text that is to be spoken with synchronized lip shape. The TTS engine generates a phoneme sequence with their duration and audio data. The TTS applies the coarticulation rules to the phoneme sequence and sends a mouth animation sequence to the face modeler. The proposed THS can make more natural lip sync and facial expression by using the face animation generator than those using the conventional visemes only. The experimental results show that our system has great potential for the implementation of talking head for Korean text.

A Novel Approach to Image Compression of Colour Images by Plane Reduction Technique

Several methods have been proposed for color image compression but the reconstructed image had very low signal to noise ratio which made it inefficient. This paper describes a lossy compression technique for color images which overcomes the drawbacks. The technique works on spatial domain where the pixel values of RGB planes of the input color image is mapped onto two dimensional planes. The proposed technique produced better results than JPEG2000, 2DPCA and a comparative study is reported based on the image quality measures such as PSNR and MSE.Experiments on real time images are shown that compare this methodology with previous ones and demonstrate its advantages.

Robust Minutiae Watermarking in Wavelet Domain for Fingerprint Security

In this manuscript, a wavelet-based blind watermarking scheme has been proposed as a means to provide security to authenticity of a fingerprint. The information used for identification or verification of a fingerprint mainly lies in its minutiae. By robust watermarking of the minutiae in the fingerprint image itself, the useful information can be extracted accurately even if the fingerprint is severely degraded. The minutiae are converted in a binary watermark and embedding these watermarks in the detail regions increases the robustness of watermarking, at little to no additional impact on image quality. It has been experimentally shown that when the minutiae is embedded into wavelet detail coefficients of a fingerprint image in spread spectrum fashion using a pseudorandom sequence, the robustness is observed to have a proportional response while perceptual invisibility has an inversely proportional response to amplification factor “K". The DWT-based technique has been found to be very robust against noises, geometrical distortions filtering and JPEG compression attacks and is also found to give remarkably better performance than DCT-based technique in terms of correlation coefficient and number of erroneous minutiae.

Robust Digital Cinema Watermarking

With the advent of digital cinema and digital broadcasting, copyright protection of video data has been one of the most important issues. We present a novel method of watermarking for video image data based on the hardware and digital wavelet transform techniques and name it as “traceable watermarking" because the watermarked data is constructed before the transmission process and traced after it has been received by an authorized user. In our method, we embed the watermark to the lowest part of each image frame in decoded video by using a hardware LSI. Digital Cinema is an important application for traceable watermarking since digital cinema system makes use of watermarking technology during content encoding, encryption, transmission, decoding and all the intermediate process to be done in digital cinema systems. The watermark is embedded into the randomly selected movie frames using hash functions. Embedded watermark information can be extracted from the decoded video data. For that, there is no need to access original movie data. Our experimental results show that proposed traceable watermarking method for digital cinema system is much better than the convenient watermarking techniques in terms of robustness, image quality, speed, simplicity and robust structure.

Prediction of Kinematic Viscosity of Binary Mixture of Poly (Ethylene Glycol) in Water using Artificial Neural Networks

An artificial neural network (ANN) model is presented for the prediction of kinematic viscosity of binary mixtures of poly (ethylene glycol) (PEG) in water as a function of temperature, number-average molecular weight and mass fraction. Kinematic viscosities data of aqueous solutions for PEG (0.55419×10-6 – 9.875×10-6 m2/s) were obtained from the literature for a wide range of temperatures (277.15 - 338.15 K), number-average molecular weight (200 -10000), and mass fraction (0.0 – 1.0). A three layer feed-forward artificial neural network was employed. This model predicts the kinematic viscosity with a mean square error (MSE) of 0.281 and the coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.983. The results show that the kinematic viscosity of binary mixture of PEG in water could be successfully predicted using an artificial neural network model.

A Secure Semi-Fragile Watermarking Scheme for Authentication and Recovery of Images Based On Wavelet Transform

Authentication of multimedia contents has gained much attention in recent times. In this paper, we propose a secure semi-fragile watermarking, with a choice of two watermarks to be embedded. This technique operates in integer wavelet domain and makes use of semi fragile watermarks for achieving better robustness. A self-recovering algorithm is employed, that hides the image digest into some Wavelet subbands to detect possible malevolent object manipulation undergone by the image (object replacing and/or deletion). The Semi-fragility makes the scheme tolerant for JPEG lossy compression as low as quality of 70%, and locate the tempered area accurately. In addition, the system ensures more security because the embedded watermarks are protected with private keys. The computational complexity is reduced using parameterized integer wavelet transform. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme guarantees the safety of watermark, image recovery and location of the tempered area accurately.

Parallel Image Compression and Analysis with Wavelets

This paper presents image compression with wavelet based method. The wavelet transformation divides image to low- and high pass filtered parts. The traditional JPEG compression technique requires lower computation power with feasible losses, when only compression is needed. However, there is obvious need for wavelet based methods in certain circumstances. The methods are intended to the applications in which the image analyzing is done parallel with compression. Furthermore, high frequency bands can be used to detect changes or edges. Wavelets enable hierarchical analysis for low pass filtered sub-images. The first analysis can be done for a small image, and only if any interesting is found, the whole image is processed or reconstructed.

Fast Cosine Transform to Increase Speed-up and Efficiency of Karhunen-Loève Transform for Lossy Image Compression

In this work, we present a comparison between two techniques of image compression. In the first case, the image is divided in blocks which are collected according to zig-zag scan. In the second one, we apply the Fast Cosine Transform to the image, and then the transformed image is divided in blocks which are collected according to zig-zag scan too. Later, in both cases, the Karhunen-Loève transform is applied to mentioned blocks. On the other hand, we present three new metrics based on eigenvalues for a better comparative evaluation of the techniques. Simulations show that the combined version is the best, with minor Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Squared Error (MSE), higher Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and better image quality. Finally, new technique was far superior to JPEG and JPEG2000.

A Copyright Protection Scheme for Color Images using Secret Sharing and Wavelet Transform

This paper proposes a copyright protection scheme for color images using secret sharing and wavelet transform. The scheme contains two phases: the share image generation phase and the watermark retrieval phase. In the generation phase, the proposed scheme first converts the image into the YCbCr color space and creates a special sampling plane from the color space. Next, the scheme extracts the features from the sampling plane using the discrete wavelet transform. Then, the scheme employs the features and the watermark to generate a principal share image. In the retrieval phase, an expanded watermark is first reconstructed using the features of the suspect image and the principal share image. Next, the scheme reduces the additional noise to obtain the recovered watermark, which is then verified against the original watermark to examine the copyright. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist several attacks such as JPEG compression, blurring, sharpening, noise addition, and cropping. The accuracy rates are all higher than 97%.

Distortion Estimation in Digital Image Watermarking using Genetic Programming

This paper introduces a technique of distortion estimation in image watermarking using Genetic Programming (GP). The distortion is estimated by considering the problem of obtaining a distorted watermarked signal from the original watermarked signal as a function regression problem. This function regression problem is solved using GP, where the original watermarked signal is considered as an independent variable. GP-based distortion estimation scheme is checked for Gaussian attack and Jpeg compression attack. We have used Gaussian attacks of different strengths by changing the standard deviation. JPEG compression attack is also varied by adding various distortions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique is able to detect the watermark even in the case of strong distortions and is more robust against attacks.

Performance Evaluation of Wavelet Based Coders on Brain MRI Volumetric Medical Datasets for Storage and Wireless Transmission

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of some wavelet based coding algorithms such as 3D QT-L, 3D SPIHT and JPEG2K. In the first step we achieve an objective comparison between three coders, namely 3D SPIHT, 3D QT-L and JPEG2K. For this purpose, eight MRI head scan test sets of 256 x 256x124 voxels have been used. Results show superior performance of 3D SPIHT algorithm, whereas 3D QT-L outperforms JPEG2K. The second step consists of evaluating the robustness of 3D SPIHT and JPEG2K coding algorithm over wireless transmission. Compressed dataset images are then transmitted over AWGN wireless channel or over Rayleigh wireless channel. Results show the superiority of JPEG2K over these two models. In fact, it has been deduced that JPEG2K is more robust regarding coding errors. Thus we may conclude the necessity of using corrector codes in order to protect the transmitted medical information.

Traceable Watermarking System using SoC for Digital Cinema Delivery

As the development of digital technology is increasing, Digital cinema is getting more spread. However, content copy and attack against the digital cinema becomes a serious problem. To solve the above security problem, we propose “Additional Watermarking" for digital cinema delivery system. With this proposed “Additional watermarking" method, we protect content copyrights at encoder and user side information at decoder. It realizes the traceability of the watermark embedded at encoder. The watermark is embedded into the random-selected frames using Hash function. Using it, the embedding position is distributed by Hash Function so that third parties do not break off the watermarking algorithm. Finally, our experimental results show that proposed method is much better than the convenient watermarking techniques in terms of robustness, image quality and its simple but unbreakable algorithm.

Selective Intra Prediction Mode Decision for H.264/AVC Encoders

H.264/AVC offers a considerably higher improvement in coding efficiency compared to other compression standards such as MPEG-2, but computational complexity is increased significantly. In this paper, we propose selective mode decision schemes for fast intra prediction mode selection. The objective is to reduce the computational complexity of the H.264/AVC encoder without significant rate-distortion performance degradation. In our proposed schemes, the intra prediction complexity is reduced by limiting the luma and chroma prediction modes using the directional information of the 16×16 prediction mode. Experimental results are presented to show that the proposed schemes reduce the complexity by up to 78% maintaining the similar PSNR quality with about 1.46% bit rate increase in average.

Orchestra/Percussion Classification Algorithm for United Speech Audio Coding System

Unified Speech Audio Coding (USAC), the latest MPEG standardization for unified speech and audio coding, uses a speech/audio classification algorithm to distinguish speech and audio segments of the input signal. The quality of the recovered audio can be increased by well-designed orchestra/percussion classification and subsequent processing. However, owing to the shortcoming of the system, introducing an orchestra/percussion classification and modifying subsequent processing can enormously increase the quality of the recovered audio. This paper proposes an orchestra/percussion classification algorithm for the USAC system which only extracts 3 scales of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) rather than traditional 13 scales of MFCCs and use Iterative Dichotomiser 3 (ID3) Decision Tree rather than other complex learning method, thus the proposed algorithm has lower computing complexity than most existing algorithms. Considering that frequent changing of attributes may lead to quality loss of the recovered audio signal, this paper also design a modified subsequent process to help the whole classification system reach an accurate rate as high as 97% which is comparable to classical 99%.

Person Identification using Gait by Combined Features of Width and Shape of the Binary Silhouette

Current image-based individual human recognition methods, such as fingerprints, face, or iris biometric modalities generally require a cooperative subject, views from certain aspects, and physical contact or close proximity. These methods cannot reliably recognize non-cooperating individuals at a distance in the real world under changing environmental conditions. Gait, which concerns recognizing individuals by the way they walk, is a relatively new biometric without these disadvantages. The inherent gait characteristic of an individual makes it irreplaceable and useful in visual surveillance. In this paper, an efficient gait recognition system for human identification by extracting two features namely width vector of the binary silhouette and the MPEG-7-based region-based shape descriptors is proposed. In the proposed method, foreground objects i.e., human and other moving objects are extracted by estimating background information by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and subsequently, median filtering operation is performed for removing noises in the background subtracted image. A moving target classification algorithm is used to separate human being (i.e., pedestrian) from other foreground objects (viz., vehicles). Shape and boundary information is used in the moving target classification algorithm. Subsequently, width vector of the outer contour of binary silhouette and the MPEG-7 Angular Radial Transform coefficients are taken as the feature vector. Next, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to the selected feature vector to reduce its dimensionality. These extracted feature vectors are used to train an Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for identification of some individuals. The proposed system is evaluated using some gait sequences and the experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.