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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
5783340
Zero-error information hiding capacity of digital images
We derive a theoretical capacity for digital image watermarking with zero transmission errors. We present three different discrete memoryless channel model to represent the watermarking process. Given the magnitude bound of noise set by applications and the acceptable watermark magnitude determined by the just-noticeable distortion, we estimate the zero-error capacity by applying Shannon's (1948) adjacency-reducing mapping technique. The capacity we estimate here corresponds to a deterministic guarantee of zero error, different from the traditional theorem approaching zero error asymptotically.
7770599
Improving soft real-time performance through better slack reclaiming
Modern operating systems frequently support applications with a variety of timing constraints including hard real-time, soft real-time, and best-effort. To guarantee performance, critical applications typically over-reserve resources based on worst-case resource usage estimates, while others may reserve based on average-case or other estimates. When resources are fully subscribed, the performance of soft- and non-real-time applications depends upon the effective distribution of dynamic slack - reserved, but unused resources - from other tasks. Motivated by several representative examples, we derive four general principles for the effective management of slack. We have implemented these principles in four progressively better slack schedulers that demonstrate their effectiveness. BACKSLASH, which employs all four principles, misses fewer soft realtime deadlines than all of the other slack schedulers we examined
7645082
An annotation language for optimizing software libraries
This paper introduces an annotation language and a compiler that together can customize a library implementation for specific application needs. Our approach is distinguished by its ability to exploit high level, domain-specific information in the customization process. In particular, the annotations provide semantic information that enables our compiler to analyze and optimize library operations as if they were primitives of a domain-specific language. Thus, our approach yields many of the performance benefits of domain-specific languages, without the effort of developing a new compiler for each domain.
This paper presents the annotation language, describes its role in optimization, and illustrates the benefits of the overall approach. Using a partially implemented compiler, we show how our system can significantly improve the performance of two applications written using the PLAPACK parallel linear algebra library.
12748109
Using leases to support server-driven consistency in large-scale systems
The paper introduces volume leases as a mechanism for providing cache consistency for large scale, geographically distributed networks. Volume leases are a variation of leases, which were originally designed for distributed file systems. Using trace driven simulation, we compare two new algorithms against four existing cache consistency algorithms and show that our new algorithms provide strong consistency while maintaining scalability and fault tolerance. For a trace based workload of Web accesses, we find that volumes can reduce message traffic at servers by 40% compared to a standard lease algorithm, and that volumes can considerably reduce the peak load at servers when popular objects are modified.
15479420
IS/IT Investment Evaluation and Benefits Realization Issues in Australia
Information systems/information technology represents substantial financial investment for many organizations. It has been shown that IS/IT investments in many organizations are huge and increasing rapidly every year and yet there is still a lack of understanding of the impact of the proper IS/IT investment evaluation processes and practices in these organizations. Thus, a survey and an in-depth case study of these practices and processes in two large governmental departments with several major IS/IT projects was conducted. The key issues presented here in some detail are of interest to practitioners concerned with making decisions about project investment and realizing benefits, as well as researchers. ACM Classification: H.0 (Information Systems – General)
2074716
Programming monads operationally with Unimo
Monads are widely used in Haskell for modeling computational effects, but defining monads remains a daunting challenge. Since every part of a monad's definition depends on its computational effects, programmers cannot leverage the common behavior of all monads easily and thus must build from scratch each monad that models a new computational effect.I propose the Unimo framework which allows programmers to define monads and monad transformers in a modular manner. Unimo contains a heavily parameterized observer function which enforces the monad laws, and programmers define a monad by invoking the observer function with arguments that specify the computational effects of the monad. Since Unimo provides the common behavior of all monads in a reusable form, programmers no longer need to rebuild the semantic boilerplate for each monad and can instead focus on the more interesting and rewarding task of modeling the desired computational effects.