10859494
Adaptive watermarking using relationships between wavelet coefficients
We propose an approach that hides watermarks in relationships between wavelet coefficients. This approach minimizes the perceptual distortion of watermarked images, measured by PSNR or just noticeable distortion (JND). Therefore, the strength of watermarks can be enlarged to increase the robustness of the watermarks, while keeping the quality of watermarked images visually acceptable. Experimental results show that the watermark is still detectable after common image processing operations such as JPEG compression, Gaussian filtering and sharpening.
16432489
Genetic watermarking based on transform-domain techniques
Abstract An innovative watermarking scheme based on genetic algorithms (GA) in the transform domain is proposed. It is robust against watermarking attacks, which are commonly employed in the literature. In addition, the watermarked image quality is also considered. In this paper, we employ GA for optimizing both the fundamentally conflicting requirements. Watermarking with GA is easy for implementation. We also examine the effectiveness of our scheme by checking the fitness function in GA, which includes both factors related to robustness and invisibility. Simulation results also show both the robustness under attacks, and the improvement in watermarked image quality with GA.
45740416
Automated Information Mining on Multimedia TV News Archives
This paper addresses an integrated information mining techniques for multimedia TV-news archive. The utilizes techniques from the fields of acoustic, image, and video analysis, for information retrieval on news story title, newsman and scene identification. The goal is to construct a compact yet meaningful abstraction of broadcast news video, allowing users to browse through large amounts of data in a non-linear fashion with flexibility and efficiency. By using acoustic analysis, the system can classify video into news versus commercials, with 90% accuracy on a data set of 400 hours TV-news recorded off the air from July 2003 to August of 2004. By applying speaker identification and/or image detection techniques, each news stories can be segmented with an accuracy of 96%. On screen captions or subtitles are recognized by OCR techniques to produce the text title of each news stories. The extracted title words can be used to link or to navigate more related News contents on the WWW. In cooperation with facial and scene analysis and recognition techniques, OCR results can provide users with multimodality query for specific news stories. Some experimental results are presented and discussed for the system reliability and performance evaluation and comparison.
7106859
Vector quantization based on genetic simulated annealing
Genetic algorithm (GA) has been successfully applied to codebook design for vector quantization (VQ). However, most conventional GA-based codebook design methods need long runtime because candidate solutions must be "ne tuned by LBG. In this paper, a partition-based GA is applied to codebook design, which is referred to as genetic vector quantization (GVQ). In addition, simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is also used in GVQ to get more promising results and the corresponding method is referred to as GSAVQ. Both GVQ and GSAVQ use the linear scaling technique during the calculation of objective functions and use special crossover and mutation operations in order to obtain better codebooks in much shorter CPU time. Experimental results show that both of them save more than 71}87% CPU time compared to LBG. For di!erent codebook sizes, GVQ outperforms LBG by 1.1}2.1 dB in PSNR, and GSAVQ outperforms LBG by 1.2}2.2 dB in PSNR. In addition, GVQ and GSAVQ need a little longer CPU time than, the maximum decent (MD) algorithm, but they outperform MD by 0.2}0.5 dB in PSNR. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
13572740
Image Texture Segmentation with Ant Colony Systems
A new scheme for texture segmentation based on ant colony systems (ACS) is proposed in this paper. Texture segmentation is one of the important branches in image pattern recognition, which provides usefulness in many applications. Until now, how to find an effective way for accomplishing texture segmentation in practical applications is still a major task. In this paper, we employ wavelet coefficients and characteristics of different subbands to serve as the basis of characteristic vectors, and we use three feature-extraction elements, namely, the extrema, entropy, and energy, to compose the characteristic vector. To alleviate segmentation fragments caused from the information in high frequency bands of texture images, we integrate the fourth element, the mean variance, into the characteristic vector. Finally, we use ACS to find a trade-off between texture segmentation and fragments. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed algorithm
35266077
VQ-Based Gray Watermark Hiding Scheme and Genetic Index Assignment
A vector quantisation (VQ) based watermarking scheme for hiding the gray watermark is presented. It expands the watermark size, and employs VQ index assignment procedure with genetic algorithm, called genetic index assignment (GIA), for watermarking. The gray watermark is coded by VQ, and obtained indices are translated into a binary bitstream with a much smaller size. We partition the codebook into two sub-codebooks, and use either one of them based on the value of the bit for embedding. Next, GIA is employed to find better imperceptibility of watermarked image. Experimental results show that the proposed method possesses advantages over other related methods in literature.
6353106
The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt): an expanding universe of protein information
The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) provides a central resource on protein sequences and functional annotation with three database components, each addressing a key need in protein bioinformatics. The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), comprising the manually annotated UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot section and the automatically annotated UniProtKB/TrEMBL section, is the preeminent storehouse of protein annotation. The extensive cross-references, functional and feature annotations and literature-based evidence attribution enable scientists to analyse proteins and query across databases. The UniProt Reference Clusters (UniRef) speed similarity searches via sequence space compression by merging sequences that are 100% (UniRef100), 90% (UniRef90) or 50% (UniRef50) identical. Finally, the UniProt Archive (UniParc) stores all publicly available protein sequences, containing the history of sequence data with links to the source databases. UniProt databases continue to grow in size and in availability of information. Recent and upcoming changes to database contents, formats, controlled vocabularies and services are described. New download availability includes all major releases of UniProtKB, sequence collections by taxonomic division and complete proteomes. A bibliography mapping service has been added, and an ID mapping service will be available soon. UniProt databases can be accessed online at or downloaded at .
10374803
Hemispherical Harmonic Surface Description and Applications to Medical Image Analysis
The use of surface harmonics for rigid and nonrigid shape description is well known. In this paper we define a set of complete hemispherical harmonic basis functions on a hemisphere domain and propose a novel parametric shape description method to efficiently and flexibly represent the surfaces of anatomical structures in medical images. As the first application of hemispherical harmonic theory in shape description, our technique differs from the previous surface harmonics shape descriptors, all of which don't work efficiently on the hemisphere-like objects that often exist in medical anatomical structures (e.g., ventricles, atriums, etc.). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through theoretic and experimental exploration of a set of medical image applications. Furthermore, an evaluation criterion for surface modeling efficiency is described and the comparison results demonstrated that our method outperformed the previous approaches using spherical harmonic models.
17310261
Cross-cultural influences on women in the IT workforce
A review of 862 papers published in SIGMIS/CPR proceedings over the past 44 years revealed only 29 articles that focused on gender and the IT workforce or gender and IT education, the majority of which were presented at the 2003 conference whose theme was diversity in the IT workforce. Therefore, in response to the call for papers to extend our understanding of topics central to computer personnel research, we present data from our field study of gender and IT that is directed at understanding differing cross-cultural influences on female experiences in the IT workforce. Four themes emerged from analysis of data from four separate studies of women in the IT workforces in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States: motherhood and careers, career choice, family dynamics and gender stereotypes. Analysis of interviews with 167 women reveals a wide range of influences on women's choice of an IT career. These results lend empirical support to the individual differences theory of gender and IT as an alternative to essentialist or social construction theories.
12795062
Mutually independent hamiltonian paths in star networks
Two hamiltonian paths P1 = 〈u1, u2, . . . , un(G)〉 and P2 = 〈v1, v2, . . . , vn(G)〉 of G from u to v are independent if u = u1 = v1, v = vn(G) = un(G), and vi = ui for every 1 < i < n(G). A set of hamiltonian paths, {P1, P2, . . . , Pk }, of G from u to v are mutually independent if any two different hamiltonian paths are independent from u to v . A bipartite graph G is hamiltonian laceable if there exists a hamiltonian path joining any two nodes from different partite sets. A bipartite graph is k -mutually independent hamiltonian laceable if there exists k -mutually independent hamiltonian paths between any two nodes from distinct partite sets. The mutually independent hamiltonian laceability of a bipartite graph G, IHPL(G), is the maximum integer k such that G is k -mutually independent hamiltonian laceable. Let Sn denote the n-dimensional star graph. We prove that IHPL(S2) = 1, IHPL(S3) = 0, and IHPL(Sn) = n − 2 if n ≥ 4. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 46(2), 110–117 2005
12419359
Primer design for multiplex PCR using a genetic algorithm
Multiplex Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) experiments are used for amplifying several segments of the target DNA simultaneously and thereby to conserve template DNA, reduce the experimental time, and minimize the experimental expense. The success of the experiment is dependent on primer design. However, this can be a dreary task as there are many constrains such as melting temperatures, primer length, GC content and complementarity that need to be optimized to obtain a good PCR product. Motivated by the lack of primer design tools for multiplex PCR genotypic assay, we propose a multiplex PCR primer design tool using a genetic algorithm, which is a stochastic approach based on the concept of biological evolution, biological genetics and genetic operations on chromosomes, to find an optimal selection of primer pairs for multiplex PCR experiments. The presented experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is capable of finding a series of primer pairs that obeies the design properties in the same tube.