Photographic imagery has come a long way from the pinhole cameras of the nineteenth century. Digital imagery, and its applications, develops in tandem with contemporary society's sophisticated literacy of this subtle medium. This book examines the ways in which digital images have become ever more ubiquitous as legal and medical evidence, just as they have become our primary source of news and have replaced paper-based financial documentation. Crucially, the contributions also analyze the very profound problems which have arisen alongside the digital image, issues of veracity and progeny that demand systematic and detailed response: It looks real, but is it? What camera captured it? Has it been doctored or subtly altered? Attempting to provide answers to these slippery issues, the book covers how digital images are created, processed and stored before moving on to set out the latest techniques for forensically examining images, and finally addressing practical issues such as courtroom admissibility. In an environment where even novice users can alter digital media, this authoritative publication will do much so stabilize public trust in these real, yet vastly flexible, images of the world around us.

This book presents the state-of-the-arts application of digital watermarking in audio, speech, image, video, 3D mesh graph, text, software, natural language, ontology, network stream, relational database, XML, and hardware IPs. It also presents new and recent algorithms in digital watermarking for copyright protection and discusses future trends in the field. Today, the illegal manipulation of genuine digital objects and products represents a considerable problem in the digital world. Offering an effective solution, digital watermarking can be applied to protect intellectual property, as well as fingerprinting, enhance the security and proof-of-authentication through unsecured channels.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in group III-nitride based ultraviolet LED and laser technologies, covering different substrate approaches, a review of optical, electronic and structural properties of InAlGaN materials as well as various optoelectronic components. In addition, the book gives an overview of a number of key application areas for UV emitters and detectors, including water purification, phototherapy, sensing, and UV curing. The book is written for researchers and graduate level students in the area of semiconductor materials, optoelectronics and devices as well as developers and engineers in the various application fields of UV emitters and detectors.

This is a practical source on recent developments in coherent and nonlinear lightwave communications. The book systematically presents up-to-date explanations of all the relevant physical principles and recent research in this emerging area. Providing an unparallelled engineering-level treatment (with 700 equations), this reference also describes the progression of coherent and nonlinear technology from yesterday's experimental field to today's practical applications tool. This work is intended as a tool for research telecommunication engineers, applications engineers working with broadband telecom systems and networks, and postgraduate students.

This book gathers the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Science and Technology 2017 (ICCST2017), held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 29-30 November 2017. These proceedings offer practitioners and researchers the opportunity to present exciting advances in computational techniques and solutions in this area. They also identify emerging issues, help to shape future research directions, and will enable industrial users to apply cutting-edge, large-scale and high-performance computational methods.

This book reports on an outstanding thesis that has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in the automated analysis and classification of speech and music. It defines several standard acoustic parameter sets and describes their implementation in a novel, open-source, audio analysis framework called openSMILE, which has been accepted and intensively used worldwide. The book offers extensive descriptions of key methods for the automatic classification of speech and music signals in real-life conditions and reports on the evaluation of the framework developed and the acoustic parameter sets that were selected. It is not only intended as a manual for openSMILE users, but also and primarily as a guide and source of inspiration for students and scientists involved in the design of speech and music analysis methods that can robustly handle real-life conditions.

This practical, comprehensive book introduces both semiconductors and integrated optics at a fundamental level, and provides in-depth derivations and analysis of key integrated optical components for more advanced study. Written from an engineer's point of view, the book emphasizes practical application; the author develops and explains the concepts and techniques needed to solve real-world problems and to understand the engineering issues involved. The book first discusses semiconductor optical material systems and then addresses the waveguide in depth. Next, it covers active devices such as lasers, modulators and detectors. Finally, there is a survey of integration and hybridization, plus the development of photonic integrated circuits. With its clear explanations and design examples, the book provides both experienced and budding engineers with the information necessary to design both the structure and fabrication process of a semiconductor integrated optical device.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive treatment of the principles, circuit design techniques, and applications of injection-locking in mixed-mode signal processing, with an emphasis on CMOS implementation. Major topics include: An overview of injection-locking, the principle of injection-locking in harmonic and non-harmonic oscillators, lock range enhancement techniques for harmonic oscillators, lock range enhancement techniques for non-harmonic oscillators, and the emerging applications of injection-locking in mixed-mode signal processing. Provides a single-source reference to the principles, circuit design techniques, and applications of injection-locking in mixed-mode signal processing; Includes a rich collection of design techniques for increasing the lock range of oscillators under injection, along with in-depth examination of the pros and cons of these methods; Enables a broad range of applications, such as passive wireless microsystems, forwarded-clock parallel data links, frequency synthesizers for wireless and wireline communications, and low phase noise phase-locked loops.

This book contains the proceedings of the KES International conferences on Innovation in Medicine and Healthcare (KES-InMed-19) and Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services (KES-IIMSS-19), held on 17-19 June 2019 and co-located in St. Julians, on the island of Malta, as part of the KES Smart Digital Futures 2019 multi-theme conference. The major areas covered by KES-InMed-19 include: Digital IT Architecture in Healthcare; Advanced ICT for Medical and Healthcare; Biomedical Engineering, Trends, Research and Technologies and Healthcare Support System. The major areas covered by KES-IIMSS-19 were: Interactive Technologies; Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics; Intelligent Services and Architectures and Applications. This book is of use to researchers in these vibrant areas, managers, industrialists and anyone wishing to gain an overview of the latest research in these fields.

Watermarks reflect the very stuff of the origin, date, distribution, composition, history and culture of paper-based items. Digital imaging of watermarks releases the research potential as widely as the internet itself. One example is the digital "fingerprinting" of paper in order to enhance the security of items, such as valuable and vulnerable maps. Revealing Watermarks, by means of the case study of one sixteenth century watermark-a crown from the arms of Danzig-illustrates how cultural influences spread and have endured across the centuries, in this case from Sweden to Russia.

This book captures the current challenges in automatic recognition of emotion in spontaneous speech and makes an effort to explain, elaborate, and propose possible solutions. Intelligent human-computer interaction (iHCI) systems thrive on several technologies like automatic speech recognition (ASR); speaker identification; language identification; image and video recognition; affect/mood/emotion analysis; and recognition, to name a few. Given the importance of spontaneity in any human-machine conversational speech, reliable recognition of emotion from naturally spoken spontaneous speech is crucial. While emotions, when explicitly demonstrated by an actor, are easy for a machine to recognize, the same is not true in the case of day-to-day, naturally spoken spontaneous speech. The book explores several reasons behind this, but one of the main reasons for this is that people, especially non-actors, do not explicitly demonstrate their emotion when they speak, thus making it difficult for machines to distinguish one emotion from another that is embedded in their spoken speech. This short book, based on some of authors' previously published books, in the area of audio emotion analysis, identifies the practical challenges in analysing emotions in spontaneous speech and puts forward several possible solutions that can assist in robustly determining the emotions expressed in spontaneous speech.

This volume comprises of 21 selected chapters, including two overview chapters devoted to abdominal imaging in clinical applications supported computer aided diagnosis approaches as well as different techniques for solving the pectoral muscle extraction problem in the preprocessing part of the CAD systems for detecting breast cancer in its early stage using digital mammograms. The aim of this book is to stimulate further research in medical imaging applications based algorithmic and computer based approaches and utilize them in real-world clinical applications. The book is divided into four parts, Part-I: Clinical Applications of Medical Imaging, Part-II: Classification and clustering, Part-III: Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) Tools and Case Studies and Part-IV: Bio-inspiring based Computer Aided diagnosis techniques.

This book shows how to develop efficient quantitative methods to characterize neural data and extra information that reveals underlying dynamics and neurophysiological mechanisms. Written by active experts in the field, it contains an exchange of innovative ideas among researchers at both computational and experimental ends, as well as those at the interface. Authors discuss research challenges and new directions in emerging areas with two goals in mind: to collect recent advances in statistics, signal processing, modeling, and control methods in neuroscience; and to welcome and foster innovative or cross-disciplinary ideas along this line of research and discuss important research issues in neural data analysis. Making use of both tutorial and review materials, this book is written for neural, electrical, and biomedical engineers; computational neuroscientists; statisticians; computer scientists; and clinical engineers.

This book introduces low-noise and low-power design techniques for phase-locked loops and their building blocks. It summarizes the noise reduction techniques for fractional-N PLL design and introduces a novel capacitive-quadrature coupling technique for multi-phase signal generation. The capacitive-coupling technique has been validated through silicon implementation and can provide low phase-noise and accurate I-Q phase matching, with low power consumption from a super low supply voltage. Readers will be enabled to pick one of the most suitable QVCO circuit structures for their own designs, without additional effort to look for the optimal circuit structure and device parameters.

This book describes grouping detection and initiation; group initiation algorithm based on geometry center; data association and track continuity; as well as separate-detection and situation cognition for group-target. It specifies the tracking of the target in different quantities and densities. At the same time, it integrates cognition into the application. Group-target Tracking is designed as a book for advanced-level students and researchers in the area of radar systems, information fusion of multi-sensors and electronic countermeasures. It is also a valuable reference resource for professionals working in this field.

This book discusses efficient prediction techniques for the current state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, focusing on the compression of a wide range of video signals, such as 3D video, Light Fields and natural images. The authors begin with a review of the state-of-the-art predictive coding methods and compression technologies for both 2D and 3D multimedia contents, which provides a good starting point for new researchers in the field of image and video compression. New prediction techniques that go beyond the standardized compression technologies are then presented and discussed. In the context of 3D video, the authors describe a new predictive algorithm for the compression of depth maps, which combines intra-directional prediction, with flexible block partitioning and linear residue fitting. New approaches are described for the compression of Light Field and still images, which enforce sparsity constraints on linear models. The Locally Linear Embedding-based prediction method is investigated for compression of Light Field images based on the HEVC technology. A new linear prediction method using sparse constraints is also described, enabling improved coding performance of the HEVC standard, particularly for images with complex textures based on repeated structures. Finally, the authors present a new, generalized intra-prediction framework for the HEVC standard, which unifies the directional prediction methods used in the current video compression standards, with linear prediction methods using sparse constraints. Experimental results for the compression of natural images are provided, demonstrating the advantage of the unified prediction framework over the traditional directional prediction modes used in HEVC standard.

This book introduces a completely novel architecture that can relax the trade-off existing today between noise, power and area consumption in a very suitable solution for advanced wireless communication systems. Through the combination of charge-domain operation with incremental signaling, this architecture gives the best of both worlds, providing the reduced area and high portability of digital-intensive architectures with an improved out-of-band noise performance given by intrinsic noise filtering capabilities. Readers will be enabled to design higher performance radio front-ends that consume less power and area, especially with respect to the transmitter and power amplifier designs, considered by many the "battery killers" on most mobile devices.

This book presents vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) from the their onset, gradually going into technical details, providing a clear understanding of both theoretical foundations and more practical investigation. The editors gathered top-ranking authors to provide comprehensiveness and timely content; the invited authors were carefully selected from a list of who's who in the respective field of interest: there are as many from Academia as from Standardization and Industry sectors from around the world. The covered topics are organized around five Parts starting from an historical overview of vehicular communications and standardization/harmonization activities (Part I), then progressing to the theoretical foundations of VANETs and a description of the day-one standard-compliant solutions (Part II), hence going into details of vehicular networking and security (Part III) and to the tools to study VANETs, from mobility and channel models, to network simulators and field trial methodologies (Part IV), and finally looking into the future of VANETs by investigating alternative, complementary communication technologies, innovative networking paradigms and visionary applications (Part V). The way the content is organized, with a differentiated level of technical details, makes the book a valuable reference for a large pool of target readers ranging from undergraduate, graduate and PhD students, to wireless scientists and engineers, to service providers and stakeholders in the automotive, ITS, ICT sectors.

This book covers various algorithmic developments in the perfect reconstruction cosine/sine-modulated filter banks (TDAC-MDCT/MDST or MLT, MCLT, low delay MDCT, complex exponential/cosine/sine-modulated QMF filter banks), and near-perfect reconstruction QMF banks (pseudo-QMF banks) in detail, including their general mathematical properties, matrix representations, fast algorithms and various methods to integer approximations being recently a new transform technology for lossless audio coding. Each chapter will contain a number of examples and will conclude with problems and exercises. The book reflects the research efforts/activities and achieved results of the authors in the time period over the last 20 years.

A textbook for elementary optical design that treats lasers, modulators, and scanners as part of the design process. Moves from the simplest concepts in optics to a basic understanding of ray tracing in optical systems, the components of those systems, and the process by which a design is produced. Features numerous problems, examples, and figures.

This work is motivated by the ongoing open question of how information in the outside world is represented and processed by the brain. Consequently, several novel methods are developed. A new mathematical formulation is proposed for the encoding and decoding of analog signals using integrate-and-fire neuron models. Based on this formulation, a novel algorithm, significantly faster than the state-of-the-art method, is proposed for reconstructing the input of the neuron. Two new identification methods are proposed for neural circuits comprising a filter in series with a spiking neuron model. These methods reduce the number of assumptions made by the state-of-the-art identification framework, allowing for a wider range of models of sensory processing circuits to be inferred directly from input-output observations. A third contribution is an algorithm that computes the spike time sequence generated by an integrate-and-fire neuron model in response to the output of a linear filter, given the input of the filter encoded with the same neuron model.

This book provides fresh insights into the cutting edge of multimedia data mining, reflecting how the research focus has shifted towards networked social communities, mobile devices and sensors. The work describes how the history of multimedia data processing can be viewed as a sequence of disruptive innovations. Across the chapters, the discussion covers the practical frameworks, libraries, and open source software that enable the development of ground-breaking research into practical applications. Features: reviews how innovations in mobile, social, cognitive, cloud and organic based computing impacts upon the development of multimedia data mining; provides practical details on implementing the technology for solving real-world problems; includes chapters devoted to privacy issues in multimedia social environments and large-scale biometric data processing; covers content and concept based multimedia search and advanced algorithms for multimedia data representation, processing and visualization.

This book highlights recent research advances in unsupervised learning using natural computing techniques such as artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, artificial life, quantum computing, DNA computing, and others. The book also includes information on the use of natural computing techniques for unsupervised learning tasks. It features several trending topics, such as big data scalability, wireless network analysis, engineering optimization, social media, and complex network analytics. It shows how these applications have triggered a number of new natural computing techniques to improve the performance of unsupervised learning methods. With this book, the readers can easily capture new advances in this area with systematic understanding of the scope in depth. Readers can rapidly explore new methods and new applications at the junction between natural computing and unsupervised learning. Includes advances on unsupervised learning using natural computing techniques Reports on topics in emerging areas such as evolutionary multi-objective unsupervised learning Features natural computing techniques such as evolutionary multi-objective algorithms and many-objective swarm intelligence algorithms