Performance Evaluation of Different Halftone Kernels for Binary Face Recognition

Data hiding and reversible data hiding research has primarily focused on grayscale and color images, because binary and halftone images are prone to visual distortion caused by a small number of errors in pixel representation. As a result, reversible data hiding is more useful than halftone-based data hiding. This study proposes an investigation of encrypted halftone images based on dual reversible data hiding, which improves the reversibility and security of the image by utilizing a dual cover image. Since halftone images are adequately compressed, they are beneficial in low-channel-bandwidth environments. Hamming code (HC) (7,4) is applied to each block of the halftone image to hide the secret data, and two halftone images are recorded and sent to different receivers at the end of the embedding process. Recipients can use the proposed method and the two marked images to extract the message and recover the cover halftone image. The proposed data hiding method can enhance the quality of the decrypted image by appropriately increasing the block size, and conversely, sufficiently large amounts of data can be hidden by reducing the block size. The experimental results provide evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of both image quality and the embedding rate.

Human face detection plays an important role in applications such as video surveillance, human computer interface, face recognition and face image database management. In this paper, we propose a novel facial feature detection algorithm for various face image types, conditions, invariant rotation, and any appearances. There are three main steps. First, Radon transform is used for face angle detection on rotated image. Subsequently, the feature regions are detected using Neural Visual Model (NVM). Finally, using image dilation and Radon transform, the facial features are extracted from the detected regions. Input parameters are obtained from the face characteristics and the positions of facial features not including any intensity informations. Our algorithm is successfully tested with various types of faces which are color images, gray images, binary images, wearing the sunglasses, wearing the scarf, lighting effect, low-quality images, color and sketch images from animated cartoon, rotated face images, and rendered face images.

We presents a new method for color printers.Our algorithm applies to both a color printer model and a model for the human visual system (HVS).The method strives to minimize the perceived error between the continuous original image and the halftone image.The color printer models can account for a variety of printer characteristics.We propose a specific printer model that accounts for overlap between neighboring dots of ink and spectral absorption properties of the inks.The color image is partitioned into several regions using clustering segmentation method, whose performance depends on the selection of distance metrics.Each clustering uses the least-squares model-based(Lsmb) algorithm to obtain halftone image.A performance measure for halftone images is used to evaluate our algorithm.Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm produces better color halftone image quality when we increase the number of clustering with a certain range.

We present general and unified algorithms for lossy/lossless coding of bilevel images. The compression is realized by applying arithmetic coding to conditional probabilities. As in the current JBIG standard the conditioning may be specified by a template. For better compression, the more general free tree may be used. Loss may be introduced in a preprocess on the encoding side to increase compression. The primary algorithm is a rate-distortion controlled greedy flipping of pixels. Though being general, the algorithms are primarily aimed at material containing half-toned images as a supplement to the specialized soft pattern matching techniques that work better for text. Template based refinement coding is applied for lossy-to-lossless refinement. Introducing only a small amount of loss in half-toned test images, compression is increased by up to a factor of four compared with JBIG. Lossy, lossless, and refinement decoding speed and lossless encoding speed are less than a factor of two slower than JBIG. The (de)coding method is proposed as part of JBIG2, an emerging international standard for lossless/lossy compression of bilevel images.

Digital halftone is the technique used to convert gray-scale images into binary ones, simulating gray shades by scattering appropriately black and white pixels. Sometimes, there arises the necessity of increasing the resolution of a halftone image. Some recent works have proposed a number of learning-based techniques to zoom binary images. However, they cannot consider a large neighborhood to decide the colors of the resolution-increased pixels, because their running time skyrockets with the growth of the window and the sample images sizes. The use of large window and samples is required to zoom halftone images accurately. This paper presents a new technique to zoom quickly and precisely images generated by any locally-decided halftone algorithm. It is based on decision-tree learning and it is very fast, even using a large window or large samples. The zoomed images obtained by this technique are incredibly sharp and accurate.

Inverse color to black-and-white halftone conversion via dictionary learning and color mapping

Biometric features such as fingerprints, iris patterns, and face features help to identify people and restrict access to secure areas by performing advanced pattern analysis and matching. Face recognition is one of the most promising biometric methodologies for human identification in a non-cooperative security environment. However, the recognition results obtained by face recognition systems are a affected by several variations that may happen to the patterns in an unrestricted environment. As a result, several algorithms have been developed for extracting different facial features for face recognition. Due to the various possible challenges of data captured at different lighting conditions, viewing angles, facial expressions, and partial occlusions in natural environmental conditions, automatic facial recognition still remains as a difficult issue that needs to be resolved. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tackling some of these issues by analyzing the local textural descriptions for facial feature representation. The textural information is extracted by an enhanced local binary pattern (ELBP) description of all the local regions of the face. The relationship of each pixel with respect to its neighborhood is extracted and employed to calculate the new representation. ELBP reconstructs a much better textural feature extraction vector from an original gray level image in different lighting conditions. The dimensionality of the texture image is reduced by principal component analysis performed on each local face region. Each low dimensional vector representing a local region is now weighted based on the significance of the sub-region. The weight of each sub-region is determined by employing the local variance estimate of the respective region, which represents the significance of the region. The final facial textural feature vector is obtained by concatenating the reduced dimensional weight sets of all the modules (sub-regions) of the face image. Experiments conducted on various popular face databases show promising performance of the proposed algorithm in varying lighting, expression, and partial occlusion conditions. Four databases were used for testing the performance of the proposed system: Yale Face database, Extended Yale Face database B, Japanese Female Facial Expression database, and CMU AMP Facial Expression database. The experimental results in all four databases show the effectiveness of the proposed system. Also, the computation cost is lower because of the simplified calculation steps. Research work is progressing to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed face recognition method on pose-varying conditions as well. It is envisaged that a multilane approach of trained frameworks at different pose bins and an appropriate voting strategy would lead to a good recognition rate in such situation.

Region extraction and labeling is a fundamental process in building computer systems that automatically analyze and interpret images and image sequences of a scene. It involves extracting meaningful regions and their attributes from an image that are of interest in a given domain, e.g., a human face in face recognition and surveillance applications, a vehicle in intelligent highway monitoring, or an industrial tool in automated manufacturing and inspection applications. In this paper, we present a generalized and fast region labeling algorithm that can be applied to numerous image processing tasks: region extraction in binary images, region segmentation from gray scale or color images, region boundary extraction, chain code extraction, run-length coding of images, and image restoration from chain codes. The general applicability of our algorithm stems from its strengths in identifying the fundamental and common computational steps and providing robust and efficient procedures to accomplish these steps without requiring multiple scans of images. Our algorithm is shown to be more effective in terms of space and computational efficiency, in comparison with many existing approaches to region labeling and extraction. Results from our experiments with over 5,000 frames obtained from MPEG-1 video bitstreams demonstrate the good performance of our algorithm in terms of video text segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency.

In this paper, we present an image authentication scheme for halftone images based on the error diffusion technique. Our scheme converts a gray-level image into a halftone image by using the error diffusion technique and embeds the authentication codes in the obtained halftone image at the same time. From the experimental results, our proposed scheme can detect the tampered places according to the embedded authentication codes. Besides, the visual quality of the stego halftone image in our scheme is satisfactory.

In this paper, a low computational complexity method is proposed to embed a multi-tone visual pattern using the concept of secret sharing. One halftone image is obtained using regular error diffusion, and the other image is obtained using the proposed Generalized Noise-Balanced Error Diffusion (GNBEDF) in considering the properties of the watermark and the first halftone image in the same time. With the proposed method, the bi-level watermark embedding becomes a special case to this technology. The bi-level watermark decoding can be simply achieved via printing the two halftone images onto two transparencies and then superimposing them together to reveal the watermark pattern. However, as the multi-tone watermark is involved, the proposed Gaussian Difference (GD) approach is needed to perform the decoding to produce a decoded multi-tone watermark. Throughout this work, a lowpass filter obtained by Least-Mean-Square is employed to assess the image quality.

This letter presents an improved visible watermarking scheme for halftone images. It incorporates watermark embedding into ordered dither halftoning by threshold modulation. The input images include a continuous-tone host image (e.g. an 8-bit gray level image) and a binary watermark image, and the output is a halftone image with a visible watermark. Our method is content adaptive because it takes local intensity information of the host image into account. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed technique. It can be used in practical applications for halftone images, such as commercial advertisement, content annotation, copyright announcement, etc.

Quaternion-based improved LPP method for color face recognition

This paper presents an improved XOR-based Data Hiding Scheme (XDHS) to hide a halftone image in more than two halftone stego images. The hamming weight and hamming distance is a very important parameter affecting the quality of a halftone image. For this reason, we proposed a method that involves minimizing the hamming weights and hamming distances between the stego image and cover image in 2×2-pixel grids. Moreover, our XDHS adopts a block-wise operation to improve the quality of a halftone image and stego images. Furthermore, our scheme improves security by using a block-wise operation with A-patterns and B-patterns. Our XDHS method achieves a high quality with good security compared to the prior arts. An experiment verified the superiority of our XDHS compared with previous methods.

Obscuring the important message before disseminating become obligatory. In a traditional (n, k) threshold visual secret sharing(VSS), size of the reassembled secret is more than the original secret image and the reassembled secret image consist of lots of noise. An (n, k)-threshold visual secret sharing system is more appropriate for binary, gray and color secret images when the reassembled secret is identical with the original secret in size and content. In the former techniques, the reassembled binary image loses contrast and the gray and color image are reassembled with a huge amount of noise which is greater in size w.r.t original secret image. The proposed approach significantly improve the quality and constructs original size of the reassembled secret image

Color face image is composed of color information of different channels. Color image provides more information for face recognition task compared with grey scale image. A novel approach coined block diagonal non-negative matrix factorization (BDNMF) is proposed for color face representation and recognition. The approach employs block diagonal matrix to encode color information of different channels. Block diagonal constraint is imposed on the non-negative matrix factorization algorithm to factorize matrices of different channels simultaneously. And block diagonal non-negative matrix factorization algorithm is exploited to extract facial features. Nearest neighborhood classifier is adopted to identify color face samples. Experimental results on CVL and CMU PIE color face databases verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.