18939289
SARI: self-authentication-and-recovery image watermarking system
In this project, we designed a novel image authentication system based on a our semi-fragile watermarking technique. The system, called SARI, can accept quantization-based lossy compression to a determined degree without any false alarm and can sensitively detect and locate malicious manipulations. It's the first system that has such capability in distinguishing malicious attacks from acceptable operations. Furthermore, the corrupted area can be approximately recovered by the information hidden in the other part of the contentimage. The amount of information embedded in our SARI system has nearly reached the theoretical maximum zero-error information hiding capacity of digital images. The software prototype includes two parts - the watermark embedder that's freely distributed and the authenticator that can be deployed online as a third-party service or used in the recipient side.
10271144
Robust image authentication method surviving JPEG lossy compression
Image authentication verifies the originality of an image by detecting malicious manipulations. This goal is different from that of image watermarking which embeds into the image a signature surviving most manipulations. Existing methods for image authentication treat all types of manipulation equally (i.e., as unacceptable). However, some applications demand techniques that can distinguish acceptable manipulations (e.g., compression) from malicious ones. In this paper, we describe an effective technique for image authentication which can prevent malicious manipulations but allow JPEG lossy compression. The authentication signature is based on the invariance of the relationship between DCT coefficients of the same position in separate blocks of an image. This relationship will be preserved when these coefficients are quantized in a JPEG compression process. Our proposed method can distinguish malicious manipulations from JPEG lossy compression regardless of how high the compression ratio is. We also show that, in different practical cases, the design of authenticator depends on the number of recompression times and on whether the image is decoded into integral values in the pixel domain during the recompression process. Theoretical and experimental results indicate that this technique is effective for image authentication.
13476763
CPU/power-constrained mobile devices
Due to the limited processing capability, memory constraints, and the power budget of mobile clients, multimedia coders and/or decoders are often difficult to implement on wireless handheld PDAs. In this Universal Tuner project, we designed and implemented a wireless video streaming system that transcodes MPEG-1/2 videos or live TV broadcasting videos to the BW or indexed color Palm OS devices. In our system, the complexity of multimedia compression and decompression algorithms is adaptively partitioned between the encoder and decoder. A mobile client would selectively disable or reenable stages of the algorithm to adapt to the device's effective processing capability. Our variable-complexity strategy of selective disabling of modules supports graceful degradation of the complexity of multimedia coding and decoding into a mobile client's low-power mode, i.e. the clock frequency of its next-generation low power CPU has been scaled down to conserve power. We modified the structure of the standard motion-compensated DCT video codecs to implement a simplified the encoder on a PC server and the decoder on a complexity-constrained PDA viewing client.
26305379
A parallel decoding algorithm for IFS codes without transient behavior
Iterated function systems (IFSs) have received great attention in encoding and decoding fractal images. Barnsley (1988) has shown that IFSs for image compression can achieve a very high compression ratio for a single image. However, the major drawback of such a technique is the large computation load required to both encode and decode a fractal image. We provide a novel algorithm to decode IFS codes. The main features of this algorithm are that it is very suitable for parallel implementation and has no transient behavior. Also, from the decoding process of this method we can understand the encoding procedure explicitly. One example is illustrated to demonstrate the quality of its performance.
8250531
Integrating Features, Models, and Semantics for TREC Video Retrieval
In this paper, we describe a system for automatic and interactive content-based retrieval of video that integrates features, models, and semantics. The novelty of the approach lies in the (I) semi-automatic construction of models of scenes, events, and objects from feature descriptors, and (2) integration of content-based and model-based querying in the search process. We describe several approaches for integration including iterative filtering, score aggregation, and relevance feedback searching. We describe our effort of applying the content-based retrieval system to the TREC video retrieval benchmark.
10152440
Watermarking capacity of digital images based on domain-specific masking effects
Our objective is to find a theoretical watermarking capacity bound of digital images based on domain-specific masking effects. We first show the capacity of private watermarking in which the power constraints are not uniform. Then, we apply several domain-specific Human Vision System approximation models to estimate the power constraints and then show the theoretical watermarking capacity of an image in a general noisy environment. Note that we consider all pixels, watermarks and noises to be discrete values, which occur in realistic cases.
6353139
Static placement, dynamic issue (SPDI) scheduling for EDGE architectures
Technology trends present new challenges for processor architectures and their instruction schedulers. Growing transistor density increases the number of execution units on a single chip, and decreasing wire transmission speeds causes long and variable on-chip latencies. These trends severely limit the two dominant conventional architectures: dynamic issue superscalars, and static placement and issue VLIWs. We present a new execution model in which the hardware and static scheduler instead work cooperatively, called static placement dynamic issue (SPDI). This paper focuses on the static instruction scheduler for SPDI. We identify and explore three issues SPDI schedulers must consider - locality, contention, and depth of speculation. We evaluate a range of SPDI scheduling algorithms executing on an explicit data graph execution (EDGE) architecture. We find that a surprisingly simple one achieves an average of 5.6 instructions-per-cycle (IPC) for SPEC2000 64-wide issue machine, and is within 80% of the performance without on-chip latencies. These results suggest that the compiler is effective at balancing on-chip latency and parallelism, and that the division of responsibilities between the compiler and the architecture is well suited to future systems.
15260570
Dynamic priority handoff scheme in differentiated QoS wireless multimedia networks
Handoff is one of the key elements in ensuring quality of service (QoS) in mobile wireless networks. Handoff connections generally have higher priority than new connections. Traditional reservation policies that reserve some channels for handoff connections are not adaptive to traffic load changes. This paper proposes a new dynamic guard channel scheme (DGCS), which 1) adapts to various traffic loads; 2) combines differentiated QoS service model and priority handoff mechanism; 3) provides fairness for differentiated QoS services; 4) does not need to exchange state information among different cells, so it is easy to be implemented and is simple enough to be used in real time environments; 5) and utilizes network resources efficiently and puts a bound on each service blocking probability. The simulation results show that the ratios among different QoS service probabilities are guaranteed to be predefined values and system utilization is improved greatly.
15301928
New techniques on deformed image motion estimation and compensation
In this paper, new techniques for deformed image motion estimation and compensation using variable-size block-matching are proposed, which can be applied to an image sequence compression system or a moving object recognition system. The motion estimation and compensation techniques have been successfully applied in the area of image sequence coding. Many research papers on improving the performance of these techniques have been published; many directions are proposed, which can all lead to better performance than the conventional techniques. Among them, both generalized block-matching and variable-size block-matching are successfully applied in reducing the data rate of compensation error and motion information, respectively. These two algorithms have their merits, but suffer from their drawbacks. Moreover, reducing the data rate in compensation error is sometimes increasing the data rate in motion information, or vice versa. Based on these two algorithms, we propose and examine several algorithms which are effective in reducing the data rate. We then incorporate these algorithms into a system, in which they work together to overcome the disadvantages to individual and keep their merits at the same time. The proposed system can optimally balance the amount of data rate in two aspects (i.e., compensation error and motion information). Experimental results show that the proposed system outweighs the conventional techniques. Since we propose a recovery operation which tries to recover the incorrect motion vectors from the global motion, this proposed system can also be applied to the moving object recognition in image sequences.
43707062
A Dependable Task Scheduling Strategy for a Fault Tolerant Grid Model
Grid provides an integrated computer platform composed of differentiated and distributed systems. In this paper, aiming at the heterogeneity and dynamism of a grid system, a novel fault-tolerant grid-scheduling model is presented based on Stochastic Petri Net. On the other hand, a new grid-scheduling strategy, the united strategy for the availability factor and expected accomplishing time (USAT), is put forward, In the end, the performance of the scheduling strategy based on the fault-tolerant grid-scheduling model is analyzed by SPNP software package. The numerical results show that USAT strategy can reduce these bad effects of dynamic and autonomic resources to some extent so as to guarantee quality of service (QoS).
1280007
Memory Prefetching Using Adaptive Stream Detection
We present adaptive stream detection, a simple technique for modulating the aggressiveness of a stream prefetcher to match a workload's observed spatial locality. We use this concept to design a prefetcher that resides on an on-chip memory controller. The result is a prefetcher with small hardware costs that can exploit workloads with low amounts of spatial locality. Using highly accurate simulators for the IBM Power5+, we show that this prefetcher improves performance of the SPEC2006fp benchmarks by an average of 32.7% when compared against a Power5+ that performs no prefetching. On a set of 5 commercial benchmarks that have low spatial locality, this prefetcher improves performance by an average of 15.1%. When compared against a typical Power5+ that does perform processor-side prefetching, the average performance improvement of these benchmark suites is 10.2% and 8.4%. We also evaluate the power and energy impact of our technique. For the same benchmark suites, DRAM power consumption increases by less than 3%, while energy usage decreases by 9.8% and 8.2%, respectively. Moreover, the power consumption of the prefetcher itself is low; it is estimated to increase the power consumption of the Power5+ chip by 0.06%