Abstract

In this paper, we propose an approach for the analysis and detection of acoustic events in speech signals using the Bessel series expansion. The acoustic events analyzed are the voice onset time (VOT) and the glottal closure instants (GCIs). The hypothesis is that the Bessel functions with their damped sinusoid-like basis functions are better suited for representing the speech signals than the sinusoidal basis functions used in the conventional Fourier representation. The speech signal is band-pass filtered by choosing the appropriate range of Bessel coefficients to obtain a narrow-band signal, which is decomposed further into amplitude modulated (AM) and frequency modulated (FM) components. The discrete energy separation algorithm (DESA) is used to compute the amplitude envelope (AE) of the narrow-band AM-FM signal. Events such as the consonant and vowel beginnings in an unvoiced stop consonant vowel (SCV) and the GCIs are derived by processing the AE of the signal. The proposed approach for the detection of the VOT using the Bessel expansion is shown to perform better than the conventional Fourier representation. The performance of the proposed GCI detection method using the Bessel series expansion is compared against some of the existing methods for various noise environments and signal-to-noise ratios.

Abstract

This paper initiates formal analysis of a simple, distributed algorithm for community detection on networks. We analyze an algorithm that we call Max-LPA, both in terms of its convergence time and in terms of the “quality” of the communities detected. Max-LPA is an instance of a class of community detection algorithms called label propagation algorithms. As far as we know, most analysis of label propagation algorithms thus far has been empirical in nature and in this paper we seek a theoretical understanding of label propagation algorithms. In our main result, we define a clustered version of Erdös-Rényi random graphs with clusters V 1, V 2, …, V k where the probability p, of an edge connecting nodes within a cluster V i is higher than p′, the probability of an edge connecting nodes in distinct clusters. We show that even with fairly general restrictions on p and p′ ( p=Ω(1n1/4−ϵ) for any ε > 0, p′ = O(p 2), where n is the number of nodes), Max-LPA detects the clusters V 1, V 2, …, V n in just two rounds. Based on this and on empirical results, we conjecture that Max-LPA can correctly and quickly identify communities on clustered Erdös-Rényi graphs even when the clusters are much sparser, i.e., with p=clognn for some c > 1.

Abstract

In this work we consider a quantum network consisting of nodes and entangled states connecting them. In every node there is a single player. The players at the intermediate nodes carry out measurements to produce an entangled state between the initial and final node. Here we address the problem that how much classical as well as quantum information can be sent from initial node to final node. In this context, we present strong theorems which state that how the teleportation capability of this remotely prepared state is linked up with the fidelities of teleportation of the resource states. Similarly, we analyze the super dense coding capacity of this remotely prepared state in terms of the capacities of the resource entangled states. However, we first obtain the relations involving the amount of entanglement of the resource states with the final state in terms concurrence. These relations are quite similar to the bounds obtained in references [G. Gour, Phys. Rev. A 71, 012318 (2005); G. Gour, B.C. Sanders, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 260501 (2005)]. More specifically, in an arbitrary quantum network when two nodes are not connected, our result shows how much information, both quantum and classical can be transmitted between these nodes. We show that the amount of transferable information depends on the capacities of the inter connecting entangled resources. These results have a tremendous future application in the context of determining the optimal path in a quantum network to send the maximal possible information.

Abstract

Diffusion Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DWI) is routinely used for early detection of cerebral ischemic changes in acute stroke. Fast acquisition with a standard echoplanar imaging technique generally compromises the image signal-to-noise ratio and in-plane resolution resulting in a reduction of the conspicuity and definition of lesions in the acquired data when viewed on a standard 8-bit display. We present a novel method for automatically and adaptively determining the window settings that enhance the contrast of the image relative to the ischemic lesions. The method performs a coarse segmentation of the lesions followed by contrast-to-noise ratio based computation of the optimal window parameters. The proposed method was tested on 24 datasets acquired with different protocols. The contrast improvement of the lesions is validated through a mirror region of interest analysis and by using the contrast improvement ratio metric. The average obtained improvement in contrast ranges from 25% to 60%. Preliminary results of segmentation showed a good reduction in the false positives and improvement in the lesion boundaries. A perception study of the windowed results against 8 radiologists was conducted. Reduction of 14.17% in the mean response time of detection was observed. Statistical analysis performed using t-test validates the reduction in mean response time to be significant. Results presented in the study show promise in the method.

Abstract

Population screening for sight threatening diseases based on fundus imaging is in place or being considered worldwide. Most existing programs are focussed on a specific disease and are based on manual reading of images, though automated image analysis based solutions are being developed. Exudates and drusen are bright lesions which indicate very different diseases, but can appear to be similar. Discriminating between them is of interest to increase screening performance. In this paper, we present a Bag of Words approach which can be used to design a system that can play the dual role of content based retrieval (of images with exudates or drusen) system and a decision support system to address the problem of bright lesion discrimination. The approach consists of a novel partitioning of an image into patches from which color, texture, edge and granulometry based features are extracted to build a dictionary. A bag of Words approach is then employed to help retrieve images matching a query image as well as derive a decision on the type of bright lesion in the given (query) image. This approach has been implemented and tested on a combination of public and local dataset of 415 images. The area under the curve for image classification is 0.90 and retrieved precision is 0.76.

Abstract

Recently Lee and Liu proposed an efficient password based authentication and key agreement scheme using smart card for the telecare medicine information system [J. Med. Syst. (2013) 37:9933]. In this paper, we show that though their scheme is efficient, their scheme still has two security weaknesses such as (1) it has design flaws in authentication phase and (2) it has design flaws in password change phase. In order to withstand these flaws found in Lee-Liu’s scheme, we propose an improvement of their scheme. Our improved scheme keeps also the original merits of Lee-Liu’s scheme. We show that our scheme is efficient as compared to Lee-Liu’s scheme. Further, through the security analysis, we show that our scheme is secure against possible known attacks. In addition, we simulate our scheme for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool to show that our scheme is secure against passive and active attacks.

Abstract

Several key management schemes for access control in a user hierarchy have been proposed in the recent years. However, most of them have dealt with key management issues for tree structured hierarchies, which result overheads when they are applied to the linear hierarchies. Linear hierarchy comprises a particularly interesting type of hierarchies, and it appears in a wide range of applications such as secure communications within security corporations and multi-layered data streaming. In this paper, we propose an effective key management scheme for linear hierarchies. Compared to the recently proposed Hassen et al.'s scheme, our scheme reduces the storage overhead of each class significantly. Further, use of symmetric-key cryptosystem (Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm) makes the key sizes for security classes to reduce in our scheme. In addition, our scheme is secure against possible attacks required for a linear hierarchy access control scheme. Security along with low storage and computational overheads make our scheme to be much suitable for practical applications for linear hierarchies.

Abstract

In an access control scheme, a deployed sensor node proves its identity to its neighbor nodes through authentication and also proves that it has the proper right to access the sensor network. After successful authentication, the shared secret keys should be established between a deployed sensor node and its neighbor nodes to protect communications. In a wireless sensor network, we often require deployment of new nodes to extend the lifetime of the network because sensor network may be lost due to power exhaustion problem or malicious nodes. In order to protect malicious nodes from joining the sensor network, access control mechanism becomes a major challenge in the design of sensor network protocols due to resource limitations of sensor nodes. Until now, there have been ample of access control schemes published in the literature, and each published scheme has its own merits and demerits. In this paper, we have identified all the functionality features and security requirements which must be satisfied for an ideal access control scheme. We have presented and discussed the recently proposed access control schemes available so far in the literature and their cryptanalysis. We have critically analyzed the storage, communication, computational overheads requirement, functionality and security analysis of the existing schemes. Further, we have performed formal security analysis of existing schemes using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. All the schemes are vulnerable to different attacks except the Zhou et al.’s scheme and the Chatterjee et al.’s scheme. However he Zhou et al.’s scheme requires high storage, communication and computational costs. Hence, we feel that there is a strong need to design an ideal efficient access control scheme in future, which should meet all the security requirements and achieve all the functionality features.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new biometric-based user authentication mechanism in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol provides strong authentication compared to traditional related password-based schemes and achieves good properties such as works without synchronized clock, freely changes password, low computation costs and mutual authentication. Our scheme establishes a symmetric secret session key shared between the user and a sensor node so that the secret session key can be used later for secure future communications between them. Moreover, the proposed scheme provides unconditional security against node capture attack and it is also resilient against different attacks.

Abstract

Recently several hierarchical access control schemes are proposed in the literature to provide security of e-medicine systems. However, most of them are either insecure against ‘man-in-the-middle attack’ or they require high storage and computational overheads. Wu and Chen proposed a key management method to solve dynamic access control problems in a user hierarchy based on hybrid cryptosystem. Though their scheme improves computational efficiency over Nikooghadam et al.’s approach, it suffers from large storage space for public parameters in public domain and computational inefficiency due to costly elliptic curve point multiplication. Recently, Nikooghadam and Zakerolhosseini showed that Wu–Chen’s scheme is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack. In order to remedy this security weakness in Wu–Chen’s scheme, they proposed a secure scheme which is again based on ECC (elliptic curve cryptography) and efficient one-way hash function. However, their scheme incurs huge computational cost for providing verification of public information in the public domain as their scheme uses ECC digital signature which is costly when compared to symmetric-key cryptosystem. In this paper, we propose an effective access control scheme in user hierarchy which is only based on symmetric-key cryptosystem and efficient one-way hash function. We show that our scheme reduces significantly the storage space for both public and private domains, and computational complexity when compared to Wu–Chen’s scheme, Nikooghadam–Zakerolhosseini’s scheme, and other related schemes. Through the informal and formal security analysis, we further show that our scheme is secure against different attacks and also man-in-the-middle attack. Moreover, dynamic access control problems in our scheme are also solved efficiently compared to other related schemes, making our scheme is much suitable for practical applications of e-medicine systems.