172381
Robust VQ-based digital watermarking for memoryless binary symmetric channel
Vector quantization (VQ) has been distinguished for its high compression rate in lossy data compression applications. And VQ-based watermarking plays a newly developed branch in digital watermarking research fields. In this paper, we propose optimized schemes for VQ-based image watermarking. We overcome the VQ index assignment problem with genetic algorithm, which is suitable for transmitting the watermarked image over noisy channels. We obtain better robustness of the watermarking algorithm against the effects caused by channel noise in our simulations after inspecting the results from several test images. In addition, to compare with existing schemes in literature, the watermarked image quality in our scheme has approximately the same quality, with better performance in robustness, to the schemes proposed by other researchers. This also proves the effectiveness of our proposed schemes in VQ-based image watermarking for copyright protection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
53306687
Identifying the combination of genetic factors that determine susceptibility to cervical cancer
Cervical cancer is common among women all over the world. Although infection with high-risk types of human papillomavirus (HPV) has been identified as the primary cause of cervical cancer, only some of those infected go on to develop cervical cancer. Obviously, the progression from HPV infection to cancer involves other environmental and host factors. Recent population-based twin and family studies have demonstrated the importance of the hereditary component of cervical cancer, associated with genetic susceptibility. Consequently, SNP markers and microsatellites should be considered genetic factors for determining what combinations of genetic factors are involved in precancerous changes to cervical cancer. This study employs a Bayesian network and four different decision tree algorithms, and compares the performance of these learning algorithms. The results of this study raise the possibility of investigations that could identify combinations of genetic factors, such as SNPs and microsatellites, that influence the risk associated with common complex multifactorial diseases, such as cervical cancer. The web site associated with this study is http://dblab8.csie.ncu.edu.tw/FactorAnalysis/.
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.
31128018
The Repetitive Sequence Database and Mining Putative Regulatory Elements in Gene Promoter Regions
At least 43% of the human genome is occupied by repetitive elements. Moreover, around 51% of the rice genome is occupied by repetitive elements. The analysis of repetitive elements reveals that repetitive elements in our genome may have been very important in the evolutionary genomics. The first part of this study is to describe a database of repetitive elements - RSDB. The RSDB database contains repetitive elements, which are classified into the following categories: exact, tandem, and similar. The interfaces needed to query and show the results and statistical data, such as the relationship between repetitive elements and genes, cross-references of repetitive elements among different organisms, and so on, are provided. The second part of this study then attempts to mine the putative binding site for information on how combinations of the known regulatory sites and overrepresented repetitive elements in RSDB are distributed in the promoter regions of groups of functionally related genes. The overrepresented repetitive elements appearing in the associations are possible transcription factor binding sites. Our proposed approach is applied to Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the promoter regions of Yeast ORFs. The complete contents of RSDB and partial putative binding sites are available to the public at www.rsdb.csie.ncu.edu.tw. The readers may download partial query results.
12475257
ProClass Protein Family Database
ProClass is a protein family database that organizes non-redundant sequence entries into families defined collectively by PIR superfamilies and PROSITE patterns. By combining global similarities and functional motifs into a single classification scheme, ProClass helps to reveal domain and family relationships and classify multi-domain proteins. The database currently consists of >155 000 sequence entries retrieved from both PIR-International and SWISS-PROT databases. Approximately 92 000 or 60% of the ProClass entries are classified into approximately 6000 families, including a large number of new members detected by our GeneFIND family identification system. The ProClass motif collection contains approximately 72 000 motif sequences and >1300 multiple alignments for all PROSITE patterns, including >21 000 matches not listed in PROSITE and mostly detected from unique PIR sequences. To maximize family information retrieval, the database provides links to various protein family, domain, alignment and structural class databases. With its high classification rate and comprehensive family relationships, ProClass can be used to support full-scale genomic annotation. The database, now being implemented in an object-relational database management system, is available for online sequence search and record retrieval from our WWW server at http://pir.georgetown.edu/gfserver/proclass.html
7951451
A New Test System for Stability Measurement of Marker Gene Selection in DNA Microarray Data Analysis
Microarray gene expression data contains informative features that reflect the critical processes controlling prominent biological functions. Feature selection algorithms have been used in previous biomedical research to find the “marker” genes whose expression value change corresponds to the most eminent difference between specimen classes. One problem encountered in such analysis is the imbalance between very large numbers of genes versus relatively fewer specimen samples. A common concern, therefore, is “overfitting” the data and deriving a set of marker genes with low stability over the entire set of possible specimens. To address this problem, we propose a new test environment in which synthetic data is perturbed to simulate possible variations in gene expression values. The goal is for the generated data to have appropriate properties that match natural data, and that are appropriate for use in testing the sensitivity of feature selection algorithms and validating the robustness of selected marker genes. In this paper, we evaluate a statistically-based resampling approach and a Principal Components Analysis (PCA)-based linear noise distribution approach. Our results show that both methods generate reasonable synthetic data and that the signal/noise rate (with variation weights at 5%, 10%, 20% and 30%) measurably impacts the classification accuracy and the marker genes selected. Based on these results, we identify the most appropriate marker gene selection and classification techniques for each type and level of noise we modeled.