This paper proposes a new robust and secure perceptual image hashing technique based on virtual watermark detection. The idea is justified by the fact that the watermark detector responds similarly to perceptually close images using a non embedded watermark. The hash values are extracted in binary form with a perfect control over the probability distribution of the hash bits. Moreover, a key is used to generate pseudo-random noise whose real values contribute to the randomness of the feature vector with a significantly increased uncertainty of the adversary, measured by mutual information, in comparison with linear correlation. Experimentally, the proposed technique has been shown to outperform related state-of-the art techniques recently proposed in the literature in terms of robustness with respect to image processing manipulations and geometric attacks.

Abstract-Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) noise is a sensor pattern noise characterizing the imaging device. It has been broadly used in the literature for source camera identification and image authentication. The abundant information that the sensor pattern noise carries in terms of the frequency content makes it unique, and hence suitable for identifying the source camera and detecting image forgeries. However, the PRNU extraction process is inevitably faced with the presence of image-dependent information as well as other non-unique noise components. To reduce such undesirable effects, researchers have developed a number of techniques in different stages of the process, i.e., the filtering stage, the estimation stage, and the postestimation stage. In this paper, we present a new PRNU-based source camera identification and verification system and propose enhancements in different stages. First, an improved version of the Locally Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform (LADCT) filter is proposed in the filtering stage. In the estimation stage, a new Weighted Averaging (WA) technique is presented. The postestimation stage consists of concatenating the PRNUs estimated from color planes in order to exploit the presence of physical PRNU components in different channels. Experimental results on two image datasets acquired by various camera devices have shown a significant gain obtained with the proposed enhancements in each stage as well as the superiority of the overall system over related state-of-the-art systems.

Bagged textural and color features for melanoma skin cancer detection in dermoscopic and standard images. Expert Systems with Applications, 90. pp. 101-110.

Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University's research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher's website (a subscription may be required.) AbstractThis paper proposes a new multispectral multiscale local binary pattern feature extraction method for automatic classification of colorectal and prostatic tumor biopsies samples. A multilevel stacked generalization classification technique is also proposed and the key idea of the paper considers a grade diagnostic problem rather than a simple malignant versus tumorous tissue problem using the concept of multispectral imagery in both the visible and near infrared spectra. To validate the proposed algorithm performances, a comparative study against related works using multispectral imagery is conducted including an evaluation on three different multiclass datasets of multispectral histology images: two representing images of colorectal biopsies -one dataset was acquired in the visible spectrum while the second captures near-infrared spectra. The proposed algorithm achieves an accuracy of 99.6% on the different datasets. The results obtained demonstrate the advantages of infrared wavelengths to capture more efficiently the most discriminative information. The results obtained show that our proposed algorithm outperforms other similar methods.

Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University's research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher's website (a subscription may be required.) AbstractEfficient writer identification systems identify the authorship of an unknown sample of text with high confidence. This has made automatic writer identification a very important topic of research for forensic document analysis. In this paper, we propose a robust system for offline text independent writer identification using bagged discrete cosine transform (BDCT) descriptors. Universal codebooks are first used to generate multiple predictor models. A final decision is then obtained by using the majority voting rule from these predictor models. The BDCT approach allows for DCT features to be effectively exploited for robust hand writer identification. The proposed system has first been assessed on the original version of hand written documents of various datasets and results have shown comparable performance with state-of-the-art systems. Next, blurry and noisy documents of two different datasets have been considered through intensive experiments where the system has been shown to perform significantly better than its competitors. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that addresses the robustness aspect in automatic hand writer identification. This is particularly suitable in digital forensics as the documents acquired by the analyst may not be in ideal conditions.