In this work we study two aspects of image security: improper usage and illegal access of images. In the first part we present our results on steganalysis – protection against improper usage of images. In the second part we present our results on image encryption – protection against illegal access of images. Steganography is the collective name for methodologies that allow the creation of invisible –hence secret– channels for information transfer. Steganalysis, the counter to steganography, is a collection of approaches that attempt to detect and quantify the presence of hidden messages in cover media. First we present our studies on stego-images using features developed for data stream classification towards making some qualitative assessments about the effect of steganography on the lower order bit planes(LSB) of images. These features are effective in classifying different data streams. Using these features, we study the randomness properties of image and stego-image LSB streams and observe that data stream analysis techniques are inadequate for steganalysis purposes. This provides motivation to arrive at steganalytic techniques that go beyond the LSB properties. We then present our steganalytic approach which takes into account such properties. In one such approach, we perform steganalysis from the point of view of quantifying the effect of perturbations caused by mild image processing operations–zoom-in/out, rotation, distortions–on stego-images. We show that this approach works both in detecting and estimating the presence of stego-contents for a particularly difficult steganographic technique known as LSB matching steganography. Next, we present our results on our image encryption techniques. Encryption approaches which are used in the context of text data are usually unsuited for the purposes of encrypting images(and multimedia objects) in general. The reasons are: unlike text, the volume to be encrypted could be huge for images and leads to increased computational requirements; encryption used for text renders images incompressible thereby resulting in poor use of bandwidth. These issues are overcome by designing image encryption approaches that obfuscate the image by intelligently re-ordering the pixels or encrypt only parts of a given image in attempts to render them imperceptible. The obfuscated image or the partially encrypted image is still amenable to compression. Efficient image encryption schemes ensure that the obfuscation is not compromised by the inherent correlations present in the image. Also they ensure that the unencrypted portions of the image do not provide information about the encrypted parts. In this work we present two approaches for efficient image encryption. First, we utilize the correlation preserving properties of the Hilbert space-filling-curves to reorder images in such a way that the image is obfuscated perceptually. This process does not compromise on the compressibility of the output image. We show experimentally that our approach leads to both perceptual security and perceptual encryption. We then show that the space-filling curve based approach also leads to more efficient partial encryption of images wherein only the salient parts of the image are encrypted thereby reducing the encryption load. In our second approach, we show that Singular Value Decomposition(SVD) of images is useful from the point of image encryption by way of mismatching the unitary matrices resulting from the decomposition of images. It is seen that the images that result due to the mismatching operations are perceptually secure.

With the increasing use of the Internet several problems have arisen regarding the processing of electronic documents. These include content filtering, content retrieval/search. Moreover, document security has taken a centre stage including copyright protection, broadcast monitoring etc. There is an acute need of an effective tool which can find the identity, location and the time when the document was created so that it can be determined whether or not the contents of the document were tampered with after creation. Owing the sensitivity of the large amounts of data which is processed on a daily basis, verifying the authenticity and integrity of a document is more important now than it ever was. Unsurprisingly document authenticity verification has become the centre of attention in the world of research. Consequently, this research is concerned with creating a tool which deals with the above problem. This research proposes the use of a Quick Response Code as a message carrier for Text Key-print. The Text Key-print is a novel method which employs the basic element of the language (i.e. Characters of the alphabet) in order to achieve authenticity of electronic documents through the transformation of its physical structure into a logical structured relationship. The resultant dimensional matrix is then converted into a binary stream and encapsulated with a serial number or URL inside a Quick response Code (QR code) to form a digital fingerprint mark. For hiding a QR code, two image steganography techniques were developed based upon the spatial and the transform domains. In the spatial domain, three methods were proposed and implemented based on the least significant bit insertion technique and the use of pseudorandom number generator to scatter the message into a set of arbitrary pixels. These methods utilise the three colour channels in the images based on the RGB model based in order to embed one, two or three bits per the eight bit channel which results in three different hiding capacities. The second technique is an adaptive approach in transforming domain where a threshold value is calculated under a predefined location for embedding in order to identify the embedding strength of the embedding technique. The quality of the generated stego images was evaluated using both objective (PSNR) and Subjective (DSCQS) methods to ensure the reliability of our proposed methods. The experimental results revealed that PSNR is not a strong indicator of the perceived stego image quality, but not a bad interpreter also of the actual quality of stego images. Since the visual difference between the cover and the stego image must be absolutely imperceptible to the human visual system, it was logically convenient to ask human observers with different qualifications and experience in the field of image processing to evaluate the perceived quality of the cover and the stego image. Thus, the subjective responses were analysed using statistical measurements to describe the distribution of the scores given by the assessors. Thus, the proposed scheme presents an alternative approach to protect digital documents rather than the traditional techniques of digital signature and watermarking.

<div>Information security practitioners and researchers who possess sufficient depth of conceptual understanding to reconstitute systems after attacks or adapt information security concepts to novel situations are in short supply. Education of new information security professionals with sufficient conceptual depth is one method by which this shortage can be reduced. This study reports research that instructed two groups of ten undergraduate, pre-cryptography students majoring in Computer Science in cryptography concepts using representational understanding first and representational fluency first instructional treatment methods. This study compared learning results between the treatment groups using traditional paper-based measures of cognitions and fMRI scans of brain activity during cryptography problem solving. Analysis found no statistical difference in measures of cognitions or in cognitive processing, but did build a statistical model describing the relationships between explanatory variables and cryptography learning, and found common areas of cognitive processing of cryptography among the study’s twenty subjects.</div>

Error Correction and Concealment of Block Based, Motion-Compensated Temporal Prediction, Transform Coded Video David L. Robie 133 Pages Directed by Dr. Russell M. Mersereau The use of the Internet and wireless networks to bring multimedia to the consumer continues to expand. The transmission of these products is always subject to corruption due to errors such as bit errors or lost and ill-timed packets; however, in many cases, such as real time video transmission, retransmission request (ARQ) is not practical. Therefore receivers must be capable of recovering from corrupted data. Errors can be mitigated using forward error correction in the encoder or error concealment techniques in the decoder. This thesis investigates the use of forward error correction (FEC) techniques in the encoder and error concealment in the decoder in block-based, motion-compensated, temporal prediction, transform codecs. It will show improvement over standard FEC applications and improvements in error concealment relative to the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) standard. To this end, this dissertation will describe the following contributions and proofs-of-concept in the area of error concealment and correction in block-based video transmission. A temporal error concealment algorithm which uses motion-compensated macroblocks from previous frames. A spatial error concealment algorithm which uses the Hough transform to detect edges in both foreground and background colors and using directional interpolation or directional filtering to provide improved edge reproduction. A codec which uses data hiding to transmit error correction information. An enhanced codec which builds upon the last by improving the performance of the codec in the error-free environment while maintaining excellent error recovery capabilities. A method to allocate Reed-Solomon (R-S) packet-based forward error correction that will decrease distortion (using a PSNR metric) at the receiver compared to standard FEC techniques. Finally, under the constraints of a constant bit rate, the tradeoff between traditional R-S FEC and alternate forward concealment information (FCI) is evaluated. Each of these developments is compared and contrasted to state of the art techniques and are able to show improvements using widely accepted metrics. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of future work.

L’interprétation du contenu de l’image est un objectif très important dans le traitement de l’image et la vision par ordinateur. Par conséquent, plusieurs chercheurs y sont intéressés. Une image contient des informations multiples qui peuvent être étudiés, telles que la couleur, les formes, les arêtes, les angles, la taille et l’orientation. En outre, les contours contiennent les structures les plus importantes de l’image. Afin d’extraire les caractéristiques du contour d’un objet, nous devons détecter les bords de cet objet. La détection de bords est un point clé dans plusieurs applications, telles que :la restauration, l’amélioration de l’image, la stéganographie, le filigrane, la récupération, la reconnaissance et la compression de l’image, etc. Toutefois, l’évaluation de la performance de la méthode de détection de bords reste un grand défi. Les images numériques sont parfois modifiées par une procédure légale ou illégale afin d’envoyer des données secrètes ou spéciales. Afin d’être moins visibles, la plupart des méthodes stéganographiques modifient les valeurs de pixels dans les bords/textures de parties de l’image. Par conséquent, il est important de détecter la présence de données cachées dans les images numériques. Cette thèse est divisée principalement en deux parties.La première partie discute l’évaluation des méthodes de détection des bords du filtrage, des contours et des angles. En effet, cinq contributions sont présentées dans cette partie : d’abord, nous avons proposé un nouveau plan de surveillance normalisée de mesure de la qualité. En second lieu, nous avons proposé une nouvelle technique pour évaluer les méthodes de détection des bords de filtrage impliquant le score minimal des mesures considérées. En plus, nous avons construit une nouvelle vérité terrain de la carte de bords étiquetée d’une manière semi-automatique pour des images réelles.En troisième lieu, nous avons proposé une nouvelle mesure prenant en compte les distances de faux points positifs pour évaluer un détecteur de bords d’une manière objective. Enfin, nous avons proposé une nouvelle approche de détection de bords qui combine la dérivée directionnelle et l’homogénéité des grains. Notre approche proposée est plus stable et robuste au bruit que dix autres méthodes célèbres de détection. La seconde partie discute la stéganalyse de l’image en couleurs, basée sur l’apprentissage automatique (machine learning). En effet, trois contributions sont présentées dans cette partie : d’abord, nous avons proposé une nouvelle méthode de stéganalyse de l’image en couleurs, basée sur l’extraction de caractéristiques de couleurs à partir de corrélations entre les gradients de canaux rouge, vert et bleu. En fait, ces caractéristiques donnent le cosinus des angles entre les gradients. En second lieu, nous avons proposé une nouvelle méthode de stéganalyse de l’image en couleurs, basée sur des mesures géométriques obtenues par le sinus et le cosinus des angles de gradients entre tous les canaux de couleurs. Enfin, nous avons proposé une nouvelle méthode de stéganalyse de l’image en couleurs, basée sur une banque de filtres gaussiens orientables. Toutes les trois méthodes proposées présentent des résultats intéressants et prometteur en devançant l’état de l’art de la stéganalyse en couleurs. / Interpretation of image contents is very important objective in image processing and computer vision. Wherefore, it has received much attention of researchers. An image contains a lot of information which can be studied such as color, shapes, edges, corners, size, and orientation. Moreover, contours include the most important structures in the image. In order to extract features contour of an object, we must detect the edges of that object. Edge detection results, remains a key point and very important step in wide range of applications such as: image restoration, enhancement, steganography, watermarking, image retrieval, recognition, compression, and etc. An efficient boundary detection method should create a contour image containing edges at their correct locations with a minimum of misclassified pixels. However, the performance evaluationof the edge detection results is still a challenging problem. The digital images are sometimes modify by a legal or illegal data in order to send special or secret data. These changes modify slight coefficient values of the image. In order to be less visible, most of the steganography methods modify the pixel values in the edge/texture image areas. Therefore, it is important to detect the presence of hidden data in digital images. This thesis is divided mainly into two main parts. The first part, deals with filtering edge detection, contours evaluation and corners detection methods. More deeply, there are five contributions are presented in this part: first, proposed a new normalized supervised edge map quality measure. The strategy to normalize the evaluation enables to consider a score close to 0 as a good edge map, whereas a score 1 translates a poor segmentation. Second, proposed a new technique to evaluate filtering edge detection methods involving the minimum score of the considerate measures. Moreover, build a new ground truth edge map labelled in semi-automatic way in real images. Third, proposed a new measure takes into account the distances of false positive points to evaluate an edge detector in an objective way. Finally, proposed a new approach for corner detection based on the combination of directional derivative and homogeneity kernels. The proposed approach remains more stable and robust to noise than ten famous corner detection methods. The second part, deals with color image steganalysis, based on a machine learning classification. More deeply, there are three contributionsare presented in this part: first, proposed a new color image steganalysis method based on extract color features from correlations between the gradients of red, green and blue channels. Since these features give the cosine of angles between gradients. Second, proposed a new color steganalysis method based on geometric measures obtained by the sine and cosine of gradient angles between all the color channels. Finally, proposed a new approach for color image steganalysisbased on steerable Gaussian filters Bank.All the three proposed methods in this part, provide interesting and promising results by outperforming the state-of-art color image steganalysis.

Information security is being considered of great importance to the private and governamental institutions. For this reason, we opted to conduct a study of security in this dissertation. We started with an introduction to the information theory, and then we proposed a new kind of Perfect Secrecy cryptographic and finally made a study of steganography in an image sequence, in which we suggest a more aggressive steganography in coefficients of the discrete cosine transform. / A segurança da informação vem sendo considerada de grande importância para as instituições privadas e governamentais. Por este motivo, optamos em realizar um estudo sobre segurança nesta dissertação. Iniciamos com uma introdução à teoria da informação, partimos para métodos de criptografia onde propomos um novo tipo de Segredo Perfeito e finalmente fazemos um estudo de esteganografia em uma sequência de imagens, onde propomos uma esteganografia mais agressiva nos coeficientes da transformada discreta de cosseno.

The security of a steganography system is defined by our ability to detect it. It is of no surprise then that steganography and steganalysis both depend heavily on the accuracy and robustness of our detectors. This is especially true when real-world data is considered, due to its heterogeneity. The difficulty of such data manifests itself in a penalty that has periodically been reported to affect the performance of detectors built on binary classifiers; this is known as cover source mismatch. It remains unclear how the performance drop that is associated with cover source mismatch is mitigated or even measured. In this thesis we aim to show a robust methodology to empirically measure its effects on the detection accuracy of steganalysis classifiers. Some basic machine-learning based methods, which take their origin in domain adaptation, are proposed to counter it. Specifically, we test two hypotheses through an empirical investigation. First, that linear classifiers are more robust than non-linear classifiers to cover source mismatch in real-world data and, second, that linear classifiers are so robust that given sufficiently large mismatched training data they can equal the performance of any classifier trained on small matched data. With the help of theory we draw several nontrivial conclusions based on our results. The penalty from cover source mismatch may, in fact, be a combination of two types of error; estimation error and adaptation error. We show that relatedness between training and test data, as well as the choice of classifier, both have an impact on adaptation error, which, as we argue, ultimately defines a detector's robustness. This provides a novel framework for reasoning about what is required to improve the robustness of steganalysis detectors. Whilst our empirical results may be viewed as the first step towards this goal, we show that our approach provides clear advantages over earlier methods. To our knowledge this is the first study of this scale and structure.

Qualifiée d’« oeuvre steganographique » par son auteur, L’Histoire veritable ou Le Voyage des princes fortunez (1610) inaugure le roman alchimique en France en réactivant le modèle littéraire de l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili « alchimisé » par Nazari et Gohory, puis édité par Béroalde de Verville (1556-1626) en 1600. Longtemps méconnu, il est redécouvert par E. Vordemann (1933) qui identifie sa source principale, traduction italienne de contes orientaux, le Peregrinaggio di tre figliuoli del re di Serendippo, de Cristoforo Armeno (1557). Eclairée par les recherches béroaldiennes qui ont suivi l’étude fondatrice de V.-L. Saulnier, notre thèse propose une édition commentée du roman qui met en valeur de nombreuses sources, le contexte de la genèse de l’oeuvre et ses modèles littéraires. La mise en fiction de l’alchimie s’articule avec la conception rationnelle ou grivoise de cet art chez Béroalde, écrivain polygraphe et médecin alchimiste. On assiste ainsi au renouvellement de l’écriture romanesque stimulant par ses jeux une « juste curiosité » du lecteur. L’étude met enfin en regard deux textes plus politiques de Béroalde, son poème L’Idée de la république (1584) et son discours anonyme, De la guerre (1589). / Described as an « oeuvre steganographique » by its author, L’Histoire veritable ou Le Voyage des princes fortunez (1610) opens the way to alchemical novel in France, by reactivating the literary model of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, « alchemized » by Nazari and Gohory before being edited by Beroalde de Verville (1556-1626), in 1600. Left in the dark for a long time, it was rediscovered by E. Vordemann (1933) who identified its main source, an Italian translation of Eastern tales, Peregrinaggio di tre figliuoli del re di Serendippo, by Cristoforo Armeno (1557). Enlightened by the essays on Beroalde, which followed the pioneering study by V.-L. Saulnier, our thesis provides a critical edition that reveals many sources, its genesis’ context and its literary models. The study shows how the fictional motif of alchemy deals with the scientific or bawdy conception of this art in the work of Beroalde, a polygraph writer and an alchemist doctor, and also how it renews the novelistic way of writing by stimulating a « juste curiosité » with its games. At last, it compares two texts by Beroalde, considered more political, his poem L’Idée de la république (1584), and his anonymous discourse, De la guerre (1589).

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T18:50:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao.pdf: 3034546 bytes, checksum: 5e2004dbb50f098736d630710e806e70 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-02-14 / Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior / Information security is being considered of great importance to the private and governamental institutions. For this reason, we opted to conduct a study of security in this dissertation. We started with an introduction to the information theory, and then we proposed a new kind of Perfect Secrecy cryptographic and finally made a study of steganography in an image sequence, in which we suggest a more aggressive steganography in coefficients of the discrete cosine transform. / A segurança da informação vem sendo considerada de grande importância para as instituições privadas e governamentais. Por este motivo, optamos em realizar um estudo sobre segurança nesta dissertação. Iniciamos com uma introdução à teoria da informação, partimos para métodos de criptografia onde propomos um novo tipo de Segredo Perfeito e finalmente fazemos um estudo de esteganografia em uma sequência de imagens, onde propomos uma esteganografia mais agressiva nos coeficientes da transformada discreta de cosseno.

Digital steganography is a technique for hiding data mostly into multimedia files (images, audio, video). With the development of information technology this technique has found its use in the field of copyright protection and secret data transfer, could be even applied in places where is limited possibility of using cryptography (e. g. by law). This thesis gives insight into digital steganography and contains an application using this technique.