Mayachitra (United States)

Seam carving is a popular technique for content aware image retargeting. It can be used to deliberately manipulate images, for example, change the GPS locations of a building or displace/remove roads in a satellite image. This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting and localizing seams in such images. While there are methods to detect seam carving based manipulations, this is the first time that robust localization and detection of seam carving forgery is made possible. We also propose a seam localization score (SLS) metric to evaluate the effectiveness of localization. The proposed method is evaluated extensively on a large collection of images from different sources, demonstrating a high level of detection and localization performance across these datasets. The code and datasets curated during this work will be released to the public.

There has been considerable interest in distributed source coding within the compression and sensor network research communities in recent years, primarily due to its potential contributions to low-power sensor networks. However, two major obstacles pose an existential threat on practical deployment of such techniques in real world sensor networks, namely, the exponential growth of decoding complexity with network size and coding rates, and the critical requirement for error-resilience given the severe channel conditions in many wireless sensor networks. Motivated by these chal-lenges, this paper proposes a novel, unified approach for large scale, error-resilient distributed source coding, based on an optimally designed classifier-based decoding frame-work, where the design explicitly controls the decoding com-plexity. We also present a deterministic annealing (DA) based global optimization algorithm for the design due to the highly non-convex nature of the cost function, which further enhances the performance over basic greedy iterative descent technique. Simulation results on data, both synthetic and from real sensor networks, provide strong evidence that the approach opens the door to practical deployment of distributed coding in large sensor networks. It not only yields substantial gains in terms of overall distortion, compared to other state-of-the-art techniques, but also demonstrates how its decoder naturally scales to large networks while constraining the complexity, thereby enabling performance gains that increase with network size.

An exhaustive computational exercise on a comprehensive set of 15 therapeutic kinase inhibitors was undertaken to identify as to which compounds hit which kinase off-targets in the human kinome. Although the kinase selectivity propensity of each inhibitor against ∼480 kinase targets is predicted, we compared our predictions to ∼280 kinase targets for which consistent experimental data are available and demonstrate an overall average prediction accuracy and specificity of ∼90%. A comparison of the predictions was extended to an additional ∼60 kinases for sorafenib and sunitinib as new experimental data were reported recently with similar prediction accuracy. The successful predictive capabilities allowed us to propose predictions on the remaining kinome targets in an effort to repurpose known kinase inhibitors to these new kinase targets that could hold therapeutic potential.

To test the effect of Palomid 529, an inhibitor of the Akt/mTOR pathway, on Müller cell proliferation, subretinal glial scar formation, and photoreceptor survival after experimental retinal detachment (RD). Palomid 529 (600 microg) in balanced salt solution or balanced salt solution alone was injected intravitreally immediately after RD into the right eyes of 12 rabbits. Ten micrograms of BrdU was injected intravitreally on day 3. Animals were killed on day 3 or 7, at which time retinal sections were labeled with anti-BrdU to detect dividing cells, with anti-vimentin to identify Müller cells, and with the isolectin B4 to identify microglia and macrophages. Outer nuclear layer (ONL) thickness was measured from fluorescence-labeled nuclear-stained sections. Labeling was imaged using confocal microscopy. Six additional animals received either drug or balanced salt solution injections into normal eyes, and paraffin sections were stained with hematoxylin and eosin. In the drug-treated eyes there was a significant decrease in the number of anti-BrdU-labeled Müller cells, the number and size of subretinal scars, and the number of isolectin B4-labeled cells. The ONL was also significantly thicker, and there was no evidence of toxic effects. Palomid 529 is an effective suppressor of Müller cell proliferation, glial scar formation, and photoreceptor cell death in a rabbit model of RD. This suggests that inhibiting the Akt/mTOR signal transduction pathway may be an effective strategy to decrease proliferation and photoreceptor cell death induced by detachment and perhaps represents a novel therapy for related human diseases such as proliferative vitreoretinopathy.

In this paper we attempt to quantify the "active" steganographic capacity - the maximum rate at which data can be hidden, and correctly decoded, in a multimedia cover subject to noise/attack (hence - active), perceptual distortion criteria, and statistical steganalysis. Though work has been done in studying the capacity of data hiding as well as the rate of perfectly secure data hiding in noiseless channels, only very recently have all the constraints been considered together. In this work, we seek to provide practical estimates of steganographic capacity in natural images, undergoing realistic attacks, and using data hiding methods available today. We focus here on the capacity of an image data hiding channel characterized by the use of statistical restoration to satisfy the constraint of perfect security (under an i.i.d. assumption), as well as JPEG and JPEG-2000 attacks. Specifically we provide experimental results of the statistically secure hiding capacity on a set of several hundred images for hiding in a pre-selected band of frequencies, using the discrete cosine and wavelet transforms, where a perturbation of the quantized transform domain terms by ±1 using the quantization index modulation scheme, is considered to be perceptually transparent. Statistical security is with respect to the matching of marginal statistics of the quantized transform domain terms.