In today's knowledge driven society and technology driven economy, when data is considered to be one of the most important corporate resource of an organization, equally important is the security of the same to prevent unauthorized users to access and manipulate it. Watermarking being an appropriate solution for claiming authorization has prompted many researchers to work in this direction and accordingly a substantial amount of research work has been done using different schemes on various media types. The main impetus in writing this paper is to provide a broader view as how much work has been carried so far and what are the different dimensions that have been taken into consideration to watermark color images using discrete wavelet transformation. The paper will help prospective researchers to gain more insight about the work that has been done and pave a way for them to design and implement better techniques.

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The growth and emergence of telemedicine has resulted into considerable increase in the transfer of medical images between various health centers over computer networks for various purposes, such as diagnosis, clinical interpretation, and archives. The security of these images is a serious concern since these images can be manipulated during their transmission over the network. Moreover, as the authentication of the medical images is required for various legal purposes; the information security requirement specifications specified by various legislative rules must be adhered by the concerned stakeholders. In this research, a discrete wavelet-based watermarking scheme has been proposed for the authentication of medical images. The experimental results obtained have shown that the proposed scheme is a secure one and robust against various common image processing attacks.

Software cost estimation is the prediction of development effort and calendar time required to develop any software project. It is considered to be the very fundamental task for successful execution of an on-going project as well as budgetary requirements of futuristic projects. As accuracy in software cost estimation is very hard because of the availability of vague information at the time of inception of the software project, it prompted many researchers to explore in this domain from past decades. Their pioneer works suggest a bulk of techniques for this purpose. However, because of the availability of large number of estimation techniques, it becomes hard for any software practitioners to select an appropriate one. To help the industry practitioners in these situations, a novel analogy-centered model based on differential evolution exploration process is proposed in this research study. The proposed model has been assessed on 676 projects from 5 different data sets and the results achieved are significantly better when compared with other benchmark analogy-based estimation studies. Furthermore, being the very less computational cost of the proposed model, it is suggested that the proposed model be considered as the preliminary stage of any analogy-based software estimation technique.

The folk theatre called Bhand Pather is probably the oldest theatre in the subcontinent if not in the world. Though the history of its evolution has not been comprehensively documented yet one can find references to it in some of the extant manuscripts. In this paper, the author attempts a complex exploration of this endangered form as a key component of tradition and its interface with modernity not merely through direct confrontation with the products like television, but also in the ideological domain. Bhand Pather lends itself for a study of the shifting landscape of the intercommunal relationships. It is one of the unique sites on which the nuances and complexities of Kashmiriyat can be easily worked out. It has been nourished both by Hindu Shaivism and Sufi mysticism. The presence of secular characters is an eminent feature of this form. The most significant feature of this art rich with the antique flavor is the way it presents us a non-idealized version of Kashmiriyat.