Fusion of Watermarking and Steganography for Protecting Image Ownership

The use of digital images has become very common because of the rapid increase of the internet over time. Moving digital images over the internet is easy, but keeping ownership is complex, and serious issues have emerged. Forgery, fraud, and pirating of this content are rising. Different techniques used to protect images, like watermarking and steganography, but these methods are not enough toprotect. So, providing new techniques is essential for protecting image ownership. We have proposed a fusion method of steganography and watermarking in this work. First, the secret message is encoded within the original image using the LSB technique to obtain the stego image. Secondly, the watermarking process is applied on the stego image using text watermarking or image watermarking to provide stego-watermarked-image. The proposed fusion watermarking and steganography method is very useful for protecting image ownership over insecure communication channels. An attacker cannot get the desired watermarked image from the stego-watermarked-image without knowing the secret message hiding inside it using the LSB technique. The proposed method is efficient, simple and secure; it provides significant protection for image ownership.

CAT: Centerness-Aware Anchor-Free Tracker

Accurate and robust scale estimation in visual object tracking is a challenging task. To obtain a scale estimation of the target object, most methods rely either on a multi-scale searching scheme or on refining a set of predefined anchor boxes. These methods require heuristically selected parameters, such as scale factors of the multi-scale searching scheme, or sizes and aspect ratios of the predefined candidate anchor boxes. On the contrary, a centerness-aware anchor-free tracker (CAT) is designed in this work. First, the location and scale of the target object are predicted in an anchor-free fashion by decomposing tracking into parallel classification and regression problems. The proposed anchor-free design obviates the need for hyperparameters related to the anchor boxes, making CAT more generic and flexible. Second, the proposed centerness-aware classification branch can identify the foreground from the background while predicting the normalized distance from the location within the foreground to the target center, i.e., the centerness. The proposed centerness-aware classification branch improves the tracking accuracy and robustness significantly by suppressing low-quality state estimates. The experiments show that our centerness-aware anchor-free tracker, with its appealing features, achieves salient performance in a wide variety of tracking scenarios.

Proposal of a Multidimensional Poverty Index for Spanish Municipalities

There are two objectives that impel this work: first, to propose a valid, reliable, and parsimonious poverty index, named Municipal Poverty Index-Urban Audit (MPI-UA), and second, to describe the evolution of the multidimensional poverty risk of the Spanish municipalities according to C. For the construction of the MPI-UA, the information provided by the URBAN AUDIT database on Spanish municipalities with a population in excess of 20,000 inhabitants has been used. The validated data have been analyzed with the PLS technique to identify the variables that allow the establishment of the MPI-UA, although previously certain variables have had to be transformed. This chapter has valuable implications insofar as there is no known multidimensional poverty index for Spanish municipalities. Moreover, it may be of probable use for academics. In the case of local managers, the index can be useful both for the knowledge of the situation and for the design of public policies to reduce poverty.

Application of Fuzzy Topsis and Taguchi Methods for Optimization Problems With Disruptive Risk

Ranking and choosing research projects and analyzing experiments are usually difficult and complex responsibilities for professional research councils at universities and research centers. Its complexity stems from having more than one variable in each project, and the participation of many decision-makers in the ranking process and selection of research projects based on many variables. The fuzzy set theory provides the required flexibility to show the uncertainty about the lack of knowledge, and also it can manage the uncertainty in the real world that the values of criteria are not defined properly. For this purpose, in the environment where the criteria of research projects are vaguely defined, the ranking methods such as Taguchi, which can reduce the number of experiments and making process more efficient, can be used for quality design in designing and processing product. In this work, first of all, the authors review fuzzy TOPSIS technique and the Taguchi method as well; then they approach research efficiency and optimization of the level of effective parameters in an experiment.

A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Based on Group-Wise Hybrid Attention for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

With the development of computer vision, attention mechanisms have been widely studied. Although the introduction of an attention module into a network model can help to improve e classification performance on remote sensing scene images, the direct introduction of an attention module can increase the number of model parameters and amount of calculation, resulting in slower model operations. To solve this problem, we carried out the following work. First, a channel attention module and spatial attention module were constructed. The input features were enhanced through channel attention and spatial attention separately, and the features recalibrated by the attention modules were fused to obtain the features with hybrid attention. Then, to reduce the increase in parameters caused by the attention module, a group-wise hybrid attention module was constructed. The group-wise hybrid attention module divided the input features into four groups along the channel dimension, then used the hybrid attention mechanism to enhance the features in the channel and spatial dimensions for each group, then fused the features of the four groups along the channel dimension. Through the use of the group-wise hybrid attention module, the number of parameters and computational burden of the network were greatly reduced, and the running time of the network was shortened. Finally, a lightweight convolutional neural network was constructed based on the group-wise hybrid attention (LCNN-GWHA) for remote sensing scene image classification. Experiments on four open and challenging remote sensing scene datasets demonstrated that the proposed method has great advantages, in terms of classification accuracy, even with a very low number of parameters.

Introduction

This book is the English version of a work first published in Italian in 1983 and reprinted in 2016. It originated from my tesi di laurea in Latin literature completed a few years earlier at the University of Florence under the supervision of Antonio La Penna, and followed the tenets of that disciplinary sphere, as was customary in Italian academia at the time: it focused on the philological dimension of Ovid’s text, the framing of the individual episode within the structure of the immediate context and the poem as a whole, and analysis of language and style. The main aim of the work was to interpret the two important episodes of Narcissus and Pygmalion—i.e. Ovid’s rewriting of the respective myths—and to highlight the author’s poetics, in response to the considerable interest that had grown in the latter decades of the twentieth century (documented, and greatly bolstered, by G.B. Conte’s influential 1974 essay ...

Bifurcations in a Time-Delayed Birhythmic Biological System with Fractional Derivative and Lévy Noise

The birhythmic oscillation is of great significance in biology and engineering, and this paper presents a bifurcation analysis in a time-delayed birhythmic oscillator containing fractional derivative and Lévy noise. The numerical method is used to explore the influence of various parameters on the bifurcation of the birhythmic system, and the role of fractional derivative and Lévy noise in inducing or inhibiting birhythmicity in a time-delayed birhythmic biological system is examined in this work. First, we use a numerical method to calculate the fractional derivative, which has a fast calculation speed. Then the McCulloch algorithm is employed to generate Lévy random numbers. Finally, the stationary probability density function graph of the amplitude is obtained by Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that the fractional damping and Lévy noise can effectively control the characteristics of the birhythmic oscillator, and the change of the parameters (except the skewness parameter) can cause the system bifurcation. In addition, this article further discusses the interaction of fractional derivative and time delay in a birhythmic system with Lévy noise, proving that adjusting parameters of time delay can lead to abundant bifurcations. Our research may help to further explore the bifurcation phenomenon of birhythmic biological system, and has a practical significance.

A First-Principles Study of the Cu-Containing β″ Precipitates in Al-Mg-Si-Cu Alloy

The nanostructured β″ precipitates are critical for the strength of Al-Mg-Si-(Cu) aluminum alloys. However, there are still controversial reports about the composition of Cu-containing β″ phases. In this work, first-principles calculations based on density functional theory were used to investigate the composition, mechanical properties, and electronic structure of Cu-containing β″ phases. The results predict that the Cu-containing β″ precipitates with a stoichiometry of Mg4+xAl2−xCuSi4 (x = 0, 1) are energetically favorable. As the concentration of Cu atoms increases, Cu-containing β″ phases with different compositions will appear, such as Mg4AlCu2Si4 and Mg4Cu3Si4. The replacement order of Cu atoms in β″ phases can be summarized as one Si3/Al site → two Si3/Al sites → two Si3/Al sites and one Mg1 site. The calculated elastic constants of the considered β″ phases suggest that they are all mechanically stable, and all β″ phases are ductile. When Cu atoms replace Al atoms at Si3/Al sites in β″ phases, the values of bulk modulus (B), shear modulus (G), and Young’s modulus (E) all increase. The calculation of the phonon spectrum shows that Mg4+xAl2−xCuSi4 (x = 0, 1) are also dynamically stable. The electronic structure analysis shows that the bond between the Si atom and the Cu atom has a covalent like property. The incorporation of the Cu atom enhances the electron interaction between the Mg2 and the Si3 atom so that the Mg2 atom also joins the Si network, which may be one of the reasons why Cu atoms increase the structure stability of the β″ phases.

The Mechanism of Evolution and Balance for e-Commerce Ecosystem under Blockchain

With the development of society, e-commerce competition has become increasingly intense and has ascended to the level of the ecosystem. Therefore, it is extremely significant to study the mechanism of evolution and balance for the e-commerce ecosystem. Simultaneously, blockchain technology is essentially a consensus mechanism, the core idea of which is decentralization, but it is actually the deconstruction of privileges and authority. Especially, the influence on the e-commerce ecosystem cannot be underestimated. Blockchain technology ultimately changes not only technology, but a comprehensive reconstruction of various industries. Building an e-commerce information ecosystem based on blockchain can promote the healthy and sustainable development of e-commerce information ecology. This work combines the definition and technical characteristics of blockchain, discusses the blockchain-based e-commerce information ecosystem model, and discusses how to achieve the ecological balance and system evolution of e-commerce under the background of blockchain. According to the internal problems of the e-commerce ecosystem, three evolutionary paths are proposed in this work. First, consider the timeliness of the information and construct a full-process information channel. Second, remove central nodes and build a safe and efficient block payment. Third, solve the blind zone in the field of logistics and create efficient and transparent intelligent logistics. This work can provide an effective reference for the development of e-commerce.

Standing in the space between fields: The interstitial power of elites in Italian banking foundations

In this article, I explore interstitiality – a concept based on Gil Eyal’s notion of ‘spaces between fields’ – as a potential heuristic lens for observing contemporary elites, applying it to high-ranking figures in the Compagnia San Paolo (CSP). CSP is a banking foundation ( Fondazione di origine bancaria or FOB) that was set up in the 1990s arising from the privatization of the Italian banking sector. After outlining the theoretical underpinnings of interstitiality, I bring the construct to bear on my own empirical work. First, I elucidate what FOBs are and why they may represent a valuable interstitial observatory on a significant segment of power elite. Second, I examine CSP as an emblematic instance of an FOB. Third, I illustrate the main characteristics of CSP’s elites, suggesting that these groups reflect the features of interstitiality insofar as: they merge logics and grammars of justification from different fields; and, given their high degree of mobility across fields, they contribute to disseminating discursive and governmental practices of hybridization. My aim, as advocated for by Mike Savage and Karel Williams, is to enrich the sociological debate on elites by introducing a new conceptual tool.