5G vehicular communication is one of key enablers in next generation intelligent transportation system (ITS), that require ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC). To meet this requirement, a new hybrid vehicular network structure which supports both centralized network structure and distributed structure is proposed in this paper. Based on the proposed network structure, a new vehicular network utility model considering the latency and reliability in vehicular networks is developed based on Euclidean norm theory. Building on the Pareto improvement theory in economics, a vehicular network uplink optimization algorithm is proposed to optimize the uplink utility of vehicles on the roads. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the uplink vehicular network utility in vehicular networks to meet the URLLC requirements.

A multi-channel access problem based on hypergraph model in ultra-dense small cell networks is studied in this paper. Due to the hyper-dense deployment of samll cells and the low-powered equipment, cumulative interference becomes an important problem besides the direct interference. The traditional binary interference model cannot capture the complicated interference relationship. In order to overcome this shortcoming, we use the hypergraph model to describe the cumulative interference relation among small cells. We formulate the multi-channel access problem based on hypergraph as two local altruistic games. The first game aims at minimizing the protocol MAC layer interference, which requires less information exchange and can converge faster. The second game aims at minimizing the physical layer interference. It needs more information interaction and converges slower, obtaining better performance. The two modeled games are both proved to be exact potential games, which admit at least one pure Nash Equilibrium (NE). To provide information exchange and reduce convergecne time, a cloud-based centralized-distributed algorithm is designed. Simulation results show that the proposed hypergraph models are both superior to the existing binary models and show the pros and cons of the two methods in different aspects.

Information-centric networks operate under the assumption that all network components have built-in caching capabilities. Integrating the caching strategies of information centric networking (ICN) with wireless virtualization improves the gain of virtual infrastructure content caching. In this paper, we propose a framework for software-defined information centric virtualized wireless device-to-device (D2D) networks. Enabling D2D communications in virtualized ICN increases the spectral efficiency due to reuse and proximity gains while the software-defined network (SDN) as a platform also simplifies the computational overhead. In this framework, we propose a joint virtual resource and cache allocation solution for latency-sensitive applications in the next-generation cellular networks. As the formulated problem is NP-hard, we design low-complexity heuristic algorithms which are intuitive and efficient. In our proposed framework, different services can share a pool of infrastructure items. We evaluate our proposed framework and algorithm through extensive simulations. The results demonstrate significant improvements in terms of visiting latency, end user QoE, InP resource utilization and MVNO utility gain.

Soft faults are inherent in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to external and internal errors. The failure of processes in a protocol stack are caused by errors on various layers. In this work, impact of errors and channel misbehavior on process execution is investigated to provide an error classification mechanism. Considering implementation of WSN protocol stack, inter-process correlations of stacked and peer layer processes are modeled. The proposed model is realized through local and global decision trees for fault diagnosis. A hybrid framework is proposed to implement local decision tree on sensor nodes and global decision tree on diagnostic cluster head. Local decision tree is employed to diagnose critical failures due to errors in stacked processes at node level. Global decision tree, diagnoses critical failures due to errors in peer layer processes at network level. The proposed model has been analyzed using fault tree analysis. The framework implementation has been done in Castalia. Simulation results validate the inter-process correlation model-based fault diagnosis. The hybrid framework distributes processing load on sensor nodes and diagnostic cluster head in a decentralized way, reducing communication overhead.

This paper investigates the wireless powered two way relay network (WPTWRN), where two single-antenna users and one single-antenna relay firstly harvest energy from signals emitted by a multi-antenna power beacon (PB) and then two users exchange information with the help of the relay by using their harvested energies. In order to improve the energy transfer efficiency, energy beamforming at the PB is deployed. For such a network, to explore the performance limit of the presented WPTWRN, an optimization problem is formulated to obtain the achievable rate region bounds by jointly optimizing the time allocation and energy beamforming design. As the optimization problem is non-convex, it is first transformed to be a convex problem by using variable substitutions and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and then solve it efficiently. It is proved that the proposed method achieves the global optimum. Simulation results show that the achievable rate region of the presented WPTWRN architecture outperforms that of wireless powered one way relay network architecture. Results also show that the relay location has significant impact on achievable rate region of the WPTWRN.

Considering that the existing Long Term Evolution is not suitable for the fast and frequent handovers of high-speed trains, this paper proposes a relay-assisted handover mechanism to solve the problems of long handover authentication time and vulnerable to security attacks. It can achieve mutual authentication for train-ground wireless communication, and data transmission is consistent with one-time pad at the same time. The security analysis, efficiency analysis and simulation results show that the proposed mechanism not only realizes the forward security and resists many common attacks, but also effectively reduces the computational overhead of train antenna during the secure handover process. When the running speed of a train is lower than 500km/h, the handover delay is generally lower than 50ms and the handover outage probability is less than 1.8%. When the running speed of a train is 350km/h, the throughput is higher than 16.4mbps in the process of handover. Therefore, the secure handover mechanism can improve the handover performance of high-speed trains.

Categorical range aggregation, which is conceptually equivalent to running a range aggregation query separately on multiple datasets, returns the query result on each dataset. The challenge is when the number of dataset is as large as hundreds or thousands, it takes a lot of computation time and I/O. In previous work, only a single dimension of the range restriction has been solved, and in practice, more applications are being used to calculate multiple range restriction statistics. We proposed MCRI-Tree, an index structure designed to solve multi-dimensional categorical range aggregation queries, which can utilize main memory to maximize the efficiency of CRA queries. Specifically, the MCRI-Tree answers any query in $O(nk^{n-1})$ I/Os (where n is the number of dimensions, and k denotes the maximum number of pages covered in one dimension among all the n dimensions during a query). The practical efficiency of our technique is demonstrated with extensive experiments.

In the field of traceability systems, researchers focus on applications in the agricultural food traceability and scanning commodities. The purposes of this paper, however, is to propose an efficient and reliable traceability system that can be applied to all kinds of commodities. Currently, most traceability systems store data in a central server, which is unreliable when the system is under attack or if the administrator tampers with the data for personal interests. Therefore, it is necessary to design a system that can eliminate these threats. In this paper, we propose a decentralized and non-reversible traceability system for storing commodity data. This system depends on blockchain technology, which organizes data in the form of chains without a central server. This chain-style storage mechanism can prevent malicious modifications. In addition, some strategies are adopted to reduce the storage pressure and response time when the system has stored all kinds of commodity data.

In this paper, we investigate the degrees of freedom (DoF) of a multi-cell multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference broadcast channel (IBC) with non-cooperation distributed base stations (BS), where each BS serves users of its corresponding cell. When all BSs simultaneously transmit their own signals over the same frequency band in the MIMO IBC, the edge users in each cell will suffer the inter-cell interference (ICI) and inter-user interference (IUI) signals. In order to eliminate the ICI and IUI signals, a distributed space time interference alignment (DSTIA) approach is proposed where each BS has only limited access to distributed moderately-delay channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). It is shown that the DSTIA scheme can obtain the appreciate DoF gains. In addition, the DoF upper bound is asymptotically achievable as the number of antenna at each BS increases. It is shown that the DSTIA method can get DoF gains over other interference alignment schemes with delayed CSIT in literature. Moreover, the DSTIA method can attain higher DoFs than the IA schemes with global CSIT for certain antenna configurations.

This paper studies synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging problem which the scatterers are often distributed in block sparse pattern. To exploiting the sparse geometrical feature, a Kronecker constrained SAR imaging algorithm is proposed by combining the block sparse characteristics with the multiway sparse reconstruction framework with Tucker modeling. We validate the proposed algorithm via real data and it shows that the our algorithm can achieve better accuracy and convergence than the reference methods even in the demanding environment. Meanwhile, the complexity is smaller than that of the existing methods. The simulation experiments confirmed the effectiveness of the algorithm as well.

Provision of higher throughput without sacrificing consistency guarantees in replication systems is a critical problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Bidirectional Chain Replication (BCR) to improve throughput in traditional Chain Replication (CR) through better utilization of computing and communication resources of the chain. Unlike CR where the whole replicated data store is treated as a single unit, in BCR the replicated shared data at each server in the chain is split into two disjoint Logical Partitions ($LP_1$, $LP_2$). This forms two chains running concurrently on the same hardware in two opposite directions; the first chain ($CR_1$) exclusively manipulates data objects in $LP_1$, while the second chain ($CR_2$) exclusively manipulates data objects in $LP_2$, therefore, conflict is avoided and concurrency is guaranteed. The simultaneous employment of these two chains results in better utilization of hardware in the sense that the two chains can evenly share the workload, hence, throughput can be improved without sacrificing consistency. Experimental results showed an improvement of approximately 85% in throughput of BCR over CR.

This work proposes a model to solve the problem of Network Coding over a one-session multicast network. The model is based on a system of restrictions that defines the packet flows received in the sink nodes as functions of the outgoing flows from the source node. A multicast network graph is used to derive a directed labeled line graph (DLLG). The successive powers of the DLLG adjacency matrix to the convergence in the null matrix permits the construction of the jump matrix Source-Sinks. In its reduced form, this shows the dependency of the incoming flows in the sink nodes as a function of the outgoing flows in the source node. The emerging packets for each outgoing link from the source node are marked with a tag that is a linear combination of variables that corresponds to powers of two. Restrictions are built based on the dependence of the outgoing and incoming flows and the packet tags as variables. The linear independence of the incoming flows to the sink nodes is mandatory. The method is novel because the solution is independent of the Galois field size where the packet contents are defined.

Many unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications have been employed for performing data collection in facilitating tasks such as surveillance and monitoring objectives in remote and dangerous environments. In light of the fact that most of the existing UAV relaying applications operate in conventional half-duplex (HD) mode, a full-duplex (FD) based UAV relay aided wireless network is investigated, in which the UAV relay helps forwarding information from the source (S) node to the destination (D). Since the activated UAV relays are always floating and flying in the air, its channel state information (CSI) as well as channel capacity is a time-variant parameter. Considering decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocol in UAV relays, the cooperative relaying channel capacity is constrained by the relatively weaker one (i.e. in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR)) between S-to-relay and relay-to-D links. The channel capacity can be optimized by adaptively optimizing the transmit power of S and/or UAV relay. Furthermore, a hybrid HD/FD mode is enabled in the proposed UAV relays for adaptively optimizing the channel utilization subject to the instantaneous CSI and/or remaining self-interference (SI) levels. Numerical results show that the channel capacity of the proposed UAV relay aided wireless networks can be maximized by adaptively responding to the influence of various real-time factors.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network paradigm, allowing administrators to manage networks through central controllers by separating control plane from data plane. So, one or more controllers must locate outside switches. However, this separation may cause delay problems between controllers and switches. In this paper, we therefore propose a Priority-based Scheduling policy for OpenFlow (PSO) to reduce the delay of some significant traffic. Our PSO is based on packet prioritization mechanisms in both OpenFlow switches and controllers. In addition, we have prototyped and experimented on PSO using a network simulator (ns-3). From the experimental results, PSO has demonstrated low delay for targeted traffic in the out-of-brand control network. The targeted traffic can acquire forwarding rules with lower delay under network congestion in control links (with normalized load > 0.8), comparing to traditional OpenFlow. Furthermore, PSO is helpful in the in-band control network to prioritize OpenFlow messages over data packets.

Action recognition is an essential task in computer vision due to the variety of prospective applications, such as security surveillance, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. The availability of more video data than ever before and the lofty performance of deep convolutional neural networks also make it essential for action recognition in video. Unfortunately, limited crafted video features and the scarcity of benchmark datasets make it challenging to address the multi-person action recognition task in video data. In this work, we propose a deep convolutional neural network-based Effective Hybrid Learning (EHL) framework for two-person interaction classification in video data. Our approach exploits a pre-trained network model (the VGG16 from the University of Oxford Visual Geometry Group) and extends the Faster R-CNN (region-based convolutional neural network a state-of-the-art detector for image classification). We broaden a semi-supervised learning method combined with an active learning method to improve overall performance. Numerous types of two-person interactions exist in the real world, which makes this a challenging task. In our experiment, we consider a limited number of actions, such as hugging, fighting, linking arms, talking, and kidnapping in two environment such simple and complex. We show that our trained model with an active semi-supervised learning architecture gradually improves the performance. In a simple environment using an Intelligent Technology Laboratory (ITLab) dataset from Inha University, performance increased to 95.6% accuracy, and in a complex environment, performance reached 81% accuracy. Our method reduces data-labeling time, compared to supervised learning methods, for the ITLab dataset. We also conduct extensive experiment on Human Action Recognition benchmarks such as UT-Interaction dataset, HMDB51 dataset and obtain better performance than state-of-the-art approaches.

Text detection has been a popular research topic in the field of computer vision. It is difficult for prevalent text detection algorithms to avoid the dependence on datasets. To overcome this problem, we proposed a novel unsupervised text detection algorithm inspired by bootstrap learning. Firstly, the text candidate in a novel form of superpixel is proposed to improve the text recall rate by image segmentation. Secondly, we propose a unique text sample selection model (TSSM) to extract text samples from the current image and eliminate database dependency. Specifically, to improve the precision of samples, we combine maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) and the saliency map to generate sample reference maps with a double threshold scheme. Finally, a multiple kernel boosting method is developed to generate a strong text classifier by combining multiple single kernel SVMs based on the samples selected from TSSM. Experimental results on standard datasets demonstrate that our text detection method is robust to complex backgrounds and multilingual text and shows stable performance on different standard datasets.

The design of an efficient scaler to enhance the edge data is one of the most important issues in video signal applications, because the perceptual quality of the processed image is sensitively affected by the degradation of edge data. Various conventional scaling schemes have been proposed to enhance the edge data. In this paper, we propose an efficient scaling algorithm for this purpose. The proposed method is based on the discrete cosine transform-based interpolation filter (DCT-IF) because it outperforms other scaling algorithms in various configurations. The proposed DCT-IF incorporates weighting parameters that are optimized for training data. Simulation results show that the quality of the resized image produced by the proposed DCT-IF is much higher than that of those produced by the conventional schemes, although the proposed DCT-IF is more complex than other conventional scaling algorithms.

Recently, continuous dimensional emotion recognition from audiovisual clues has attracted increasing attention in both theory and in practice. The large amount of data involved in the recognition processing decreases the efficiency of most bimodal information fusion algorithms. A novel algorithm, namely the incomplete Cholesky decomposition based kernel cross factor analysis (ICDKCFA), is presented and employed for continuous dimensional audiovisual emotion recognition, in this paper. After the ICDKCFA feature transformation, two basic fusion strategies, namely feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion, are explored to combine the transformed visual and audio features for emotion recognition. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the ICDKCFA approach on the AVEC 2016 Multimodal Affect Recognition Sub-Challenge dataset. The experimental results show that the ICDKCFA method has a higher speed than the original kernel cross factor analysis with the comparable performance. Moreover, the ICDKCFA method achieves a better performance than other common information fusion methods, such as the Canonical correlation analysis, kernel canonical correlation analysis and cross-modal factor analysis based fusion methods.

Action recognition has been studied in computer vision field for years. We present an effective approach to recognize actions using a dimension reduction method, which is applied as a crucial step to reduce the dimensionality of feature descriptors after extracting features. We propose to use sparse matrix and randomized kd-tree to modify it and then propose modified Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis (mLFDA) method which greatly reduces the required memory and accelerate the standard Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis. For feature encoding, we propose a useful encoding method called mix encoding which combines Fisher vector encoding and locality-constrained linear coding to get the final video representations. In order to add more meaningful features to the process of action recognition, the convolutional neural network is utilized and combined with mix encoding to produce the deep network feature. Experimental results show that our algorithm is a competitive method on KTH dataset, HMDB51 dataset and UCF101 dataset when combining all these methods.

In this paper, an adaptive iterative algorithm is proposed for motion deblurring by using the salient intensity prior. Based on the observation that the salient intensity of the clear image is sparse, and the salient intensity of the blurred image is less sparse during the image blurring process. The salient intensity prior is proposed to enforce the sparsity of the distribution of the saliency in the latent image, which guides the blind deblurring in various scenarios. Furthermore, an adaptive iteration strategy is proposed to adjust the number of iterations by evaluating the performance of the latent image and the similarity of the estimated blur kernel. The negative influence of overabundant iterations in each scale is effectively restrained in this way. Experiments on publicly available image deblurring datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art deblurring results with small computational costs.

Visual tracking is a challenging task that needs learning an effective model to handle the changes of target appearance caused by factors such as pose variation, illumination change, occlusion and motion blur. In this paper, a novel tracking algorithm based on weighted local sub-space reconstruction error is presented. First, accounting for the appearance changes in the tracking process, a generative weight calculation method based on structural reconstruction error is proposed. Furthermore, a template update scheme of occlusion-aware is introduced, in which we reconstruct a new template instead of simply exploiting the best observation for template update. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm are verified by comparing it with some state-of-the-art algorithms quantitatively and qualitatively.

Biometric recognition systems have been widely used for information security. Among the most popular biometric traits, there are fingerprint and face due to their high recognition accuracies. However, the security system that uses face recognition as the login method are vulnerable to face-spoofing attacks, from using printed photo or video of the valid user. In this study, we propose a fast and robust method to detect face-spoofing attacks based on the analysis of spatial frequency differences between the real and fake videos. We found that the effect of a spoofing attack stands out more prominently in certain regions of the 2D Fourier spectra and, therefore, it is adequate to use the information about those regions to classify the input video or image as real or fake. We adopt a divide-conquer-aggregate approach, where we first divide the frequency domain image into local blocks, classify each local block independently, and then aggregate all the classification results by the weighted-sum approach. The effectiveness of the methodology is demonstrated using two different publicly available databases, namely: 1) Replay Attack Database and 2) CASIA-Face Anti-Spoofing Database. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides state-of-the-art performance by processing fewer frames of each video.

Crowd behavior analysis research has revealed a central role in helping people to find safety hazards or crime optimistic forecast. Thus, it is significant in the future video surveillance systems. Recently, the growing demand for safety monitoring has changed the awareness of video surveillance studies from analysis of individuals behavior to group behavior. Group detection is the process before crowd behavior analysis, which separates scene of individuals in a crowd into respective groups by understanding their complex relations. Most existing studies on group detection are scene-specific. Crowds with various densities, structures, and occlusion of each other are the challenges for group detection in diverse crowded scenes. Therefore, we propose a group detection approach called Collective Interaction Filtering to discover people motion interaction from trajectories. This approach is able to deduce people interaction with the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. The Collective Interaction Filtering approach accurately identifies groups by clustering trajectories in crowds with various densities, structures and occlusion of each other. It also tackles grouping consistency between frames. Experiments on the CUHK Crowd Dataset demonstrate that approach used in this study achieves better than previous methods which leads to latest results.

Many critical applications require accurate real-time human action recognition. However, there are many hurdles associated with capturing and pre-processing image data, calculating features, and classification because they consume significant resources for both storage and computation. To circumvent these hurdles, this paper presents a recognition machine learning (ML) based system model which uses reduced data structure features by projecting real 3D skeleton modality on virtual 2D space. The MMU VAAC dataset is used to test the proposed ML model. The results show a high accuracy rate of 97.88% which is only slightly lower than the accuracy when using the original 3D modality-based features but with a 75% reduction ratio from using RGB modality. These results motivate implementing the proposed recognition model on an embedded system platform in the future.

Tongue diagnosis is one of the most important diagnostic methods in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Tongue image segmentation aims to extract the image object (i.e., tongue body), which plays a key role in the process of manufacturing an automated tongue diagnosis system. It is still challenging, because there exists the personal diversity in tongue appearances such as size, shape, and color. This paper proposes an innovative segmentation method that uses image thresholding, gray projection and active contour model (ACM). Specifically, an initial object region is first extracted by performing image thresholding in HSI (i.e., Hue Saturation Intensity) color space, and subsequent morphological operations. Then, a gray projection technique is used to determine the upper bound of the tongue body root for refining the initial object region. Finally, the contour of the refined object region is smoothed by ACM. Experimental results on a dataset composed of 100 color tongue images showed that the proposed method obtained more accurate segmentation results than other available state-of-the-art methods.

The human voice is a convenient method of information transfer between different objects such as between men, men and machine, between machines. The development of information and communication technology, the voice has been able to transfer farther than before. The way to communicate, it is to convert the voice to another form, transmit it, and then reconvert it back to sound. In such a communication process, a vocoder is a method of converting and re-converting a voice and sound. The CELP (Code-Excited Linear Prediction) type vocoder, one of the voice codecs, is adapted as a standard codec since it provides high quality sound even though its transmission speed is relatively low. The EVRC (Enhanced Variable Rate CODEC) and QCELP (Qualcomm Code-Excited Linear Prediction), variable bit rate vocoders, are used for mobile phones in 3G environment. For the real-time implementation of a vocoder, the reduction of sound quality is a typical problem. To improve the sound quality, that is important to know the size and shape of noise. In the existing sound quality improvement method, the voice activated is detected or used, or statistical methods are used by the large mount of data. However, there is a disadvantage in that no noise can be detected, when there is a continuous signal or when a change in noise is large.This paper focused on finding a better way to decrease the reduction of sound quality in lower bit transmission environments. Based on simulation results, this study proposed a preprocessor application that estimates the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) using the spectral SNR estimation method. The SNR estimation method adopted the IMBE (Improved Multi-Band Excitation) instead of using the SNR, which is a continuous speech signal. Finally, this application improves the quality of the vocoder by enhancing sound quality adaptively.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, the problem of privacy protection has been paid great attention. Recently, Nikooghadam et al. pointed out that Kumari et al.'s protocol can neither resist off-line guessing attack nor preserve user anonymity. Moreover, the authors also proposed an authentication supportive session initial protocol, claiming to resist various vulnerability attacks. Unfortunately, this paper proves that the authentication protocols of Kumari et al. and Nikooghadam et al. have neither the ability to preserve perfect forward secrecy nor the ability to resist key-compromise impersonation attack. In order to remedy such flaws in their protocols, we design a lightweight authentication protocol using elliptic curve cryptography. By way of informal security analysis, it is shown that the proposed protocol can both resist a variety of attacks and provide more security. Afterward, it is also proved that the protocol is resistant against active and passive attacks under Dolev-Yao model by means of Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic (BAN-Logic), and fulfills mutual authentication using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) software. Subsequently, we compare the protocol with the related scheme in terms of computational complexity and security. The comparative analytics witness that the proposed protocol is more suitable for practical application scenarios.

Threshold ring signature scheme enables any t entities from N ring members to spontaneously generate a publicly verifiable t-out-of-N signature anonymously. The verifier is convinced that the signature is indeed generated by at least t users from the claimed group, but he cannot tell them apart. Threshold ring signatures are significant for ad-hoc groups such as mobile ad-hoc networks. Based on the lattice-based ring signature proposed by Melchor et al. at AFRICRYPT'13, this work presents a lattice-based threshold ring signature scheme, employing the technique of message block sharing proposed by Choi and Kim. Besides, in order to avoid the system parameter setup problems, we proposed a message processing technique called "pad-then-permute", to pre-process the message before blocking the message, thus making the threshold ring signature scheme more flexible. Our threshold ring signature scheme has several advantages: inherits the quantum immunity from the lattice structure; has considerably short signature and almost no signature size increase with the threshold value; provable to be correct, efficient, indistinguishable source hiding, and unforgeable.

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) provides some real-time cloud applications; i.e. the cloud, acting as a data-hider, automatically embeds timestamp in the encrypted image uploaded by a content owner. Many existing methods of RDHEI only satisfy user privacy in which the data-hider does not know the original image, but leaks owner privacy in which the receiver can obtains the original image by decryption and extraction. In the literature, the method of Zhang et al. is the one providing weak content-owner privacy in which the content-owner and data-hider have to share a data-hiding key. In this paper, we take care of the stronger notion, called strong content-owner privacy, and achieve it by presenting a new reversible data hiding in encrypted images. In the proposed method, image decryption and message extraction are separately controlled by different types of keys, and thus such functionalities are decoupled to solve the privacy problem. At the technique level, the original image is segmented along a Hilbert filling curve. To keep image privacy, segments are transformed into an encrypted image by using random permutation. The encrypted image does not reveal significant information about the original one. Data embedment can be realized by using pixel histogram-style hiding, since this property, can be preserved before or after encryption. The proposed method is a modular method to compile some specific reversible data hiding to those in encrypted image with content owner privacy. Finally, our experimental results show that the image quality is 50.85dB when the averaged payload is 0.12bpp.

With delegating proxy to process data before outsourcing, data owners in restricted access could enjoy flexible and powerful cloud storage service for productivity, but still confront with data integrity breach. Identity-based data auditing as a critical technology, could address this security concern efficiently and eliminate complicated owners' public key certificates management issue. Recently, Yu et al. proposed an Identity-Based Public Auditing for Dynamic Outsourced Data with Proxy Processing (https://doi.org/10.3837/tiis.2017.10.019). It aims to offer identity-based, privacy-preserving and batch auditing for multiple owners' data on different clouds, while allowing proxy processing. In this article, we first demonstrate this scheme is insecure in the sense that malicious cloud could pass integrity auditing without original data. Additionally, clouds and owners are able to recover proxy's private key and thus impersonate it to forge tags for any data. Secondly, we propose an improved scheme with provable security in the random oracle model, to achieve desirable secure identity based privacy-preserving batch public auditing with proxy processing. Thirdly, based on theoretical analysis and performance simulation, our scheme shows better efficiency over existing identity-based auditing scheme with proxy processing on single owner and single cloud effort, which will benefit secure big data storage if extrapolating in real application.

Information security has become increasingly important with the rapid development of mobile devices and internet. An efficient encryption system is a key to this end. In this paper, we propose an image encryption method based on the cross diffusion of two chaotic maps. We use two chaotic sequences, namely the Logistic map and the Chebyshev map, for key generation which has larger security key space than single one. Moreover, we use these two sequences for further image encryption diffusion which decreases the correlation of neighboring pixels significantly. We conduct extensive experiments on several well-known images like Lena, Baboon, Koala, etc. Experimental results show that our algorithm has the characteristics of large key space, fast, robust to statistic attack, etc.

A better tradeoff between robustness and invisibility will be realized by using the just noticeable (JND) model into the quantization-based watermarking scheme. The JND model is usually used to describe the perception characteristics of human visual systems (HVS). According to the research of cognitive science, HVS can adaptively extract the structure features of an image. However, the existing JND models in the watermarking scheme do not consider the structure features. Therefore, a novel JND model is proposed, which includes three aspects: contrast sensitivity function, luminance adaptation, and contrast masking (CM). In this model, the CM effect is modeled by analyzing the direction features and texture complexity, which meets the human visual perception characteristics and matches well with the spread transform dither modulation (STDM) watermarking framework by employing a new method to measure edge intensity. Compared with the other existing JND models, the proposed JND model based on structural regularity is more efficient and applicable in the STDM watermarking scheme. In terms of the experimental results, the proposed scheme performs better than the other watermarking scheme based on the existing JND models.

A code-based cryptosystem can resist quantum-computing attacks. However, an original system based on the Goppa code has a large key size, which makes it unpractical in embedded devices with limited sources. Many special error-correcting codes have recently been developed to reduce the key size, and yet these systems are easily broken through side channel attacks, particularly differential power analysis (DPA) attacks, when they are applied to hardware devices. To address this problem, a higher-order masking scheme for a McEliece cryptosystem based on the quasi-dyadic moderate density parity check (QD-MDPC) code has been proposed. The proposed scheme has a small key size and is able to resist DPA attacks. In this paper, a novel McEliece cryptosystem based on the QD-MDPC code is demonstrated. The key size of this novel cryptosystem is reduced by 78 times, which meets the requirements of embedded devices. Further, based on the novel cryptosystem, a higher-order masking scheme was developed by constructing an extension Ishai-Sahai-Wagne (ISW) masking scheme. The authenticity and integrity analysis verify that the proposed scheme has higher security than conventional approaches. Finally, a side channel attack experiment was also conducted to verify that the novel masking system is able to defend against high-order DPA attacks on hardware devices. Based on the experimental validation, it can be concluded that the proposed higher-order masking scheme can be applied as an advanced protection solution for devices with limited resources.