Iris became an important biometric in the last decade, due to its uniqueness and richness of features. In this paper, a novel super-resolution and image registration technique for visual (non-infra-red) iris images is presented. In the proposed technique a full face, 3 second long, 90 frames, visual video is captured with a digital camera located 3 feet away from each subject. Iris images are segmented from the full face image. A cross correlation model is applied for the registration/ alignment of full gray scale iris images. A high resolution iris image, that is 4 times higher in terms of size and resolution, is constructed from every 9 low resolution images. This process of building a high resolution image is based on an auto_regressive signature model between consecutive low resolution images in filling the sub pixels in the constructed high resolution image. Then this process is iterated until a 16 times higher resolution iris image is constructed. Illustrative images are shown that prove the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

Both standard and windowed watchdog timers were designed to detect flow faults and ensure the safe operation of the systems they supervise. This paper studies the effect of transient failures on microprocessors, and utilizes two methods to compare the fault coverage of both watchdog timers. The first method is injecting a fault while a processor is reading an image from RAM and sending it to the VGA RAM for display. This method is implemented on FPGA, and visually demonstrates the existence of fast watchdog resets which can not be detected by standard watchdog timers, and faulty resets which occur undetected within the safe window of the windowed watchdog timers. The second method is a simulation where the fault coverage for each watchdog timer system is calculated. This simulation tries to take into consideration many factors which could affect the outcome of this comparison.

Satellite and Ariel imaging systems are located at high altitudes. Thus, they are more vulnerable to Soft errors than similar systems operating at sea level. This paper studies the effect of transient faults on microprocessor based imaging systems. The paper studies the ability of different watchdog timer systems to recover the system from failure. A new improved watchdog timer system design is introduced. This new design solves the problems of both the standard and windowed watchdog timers. The watchdog timers are tested by injecting a fault while a processor is reading an image from RAM and sending it to the VGA RAM for display. This method is implemented on FPGA, and visually demonstrates the existence of fast watchdog resets, which can not be detected by standard watchdog timers, and faulty resets which occur undetected within the safe window of the windowed watchdog timers.

Super-Resolution image construction has gained increased importance recently. This is due to the demand for resolution enhancement for many imaging applications, as it is much efficient to capture images in a low resolution environment. The Bspline mathematical functions have long been utilized for signal representation. However they have been just recently been used for signal interpolation and zooming. This is due to the fact that they are flexible and provide the best cost/quality trade off relationship. In this paper we present a super-resolution image construction algorithm, where the high frequencies and edges of the high resolution constructed image are solely based on the Bspline signal representation. Mathematical explanation and derivation for the proposed Bspline prediction is analyzed. Several texture images from the Vistex database has been used to test the proposed technique. Extensive simulation results, that have been carried out with the proposed approach on different classes of images and demonstrated its usefulness, are proposed.

The Natural Preserve Transform (NPT) has been presented as a tool for fuzzy logic watermarking. This paper describes a new image watermarking technique based on Naturalness Preserving Transform (NPT). The proposed watermarking scheme uses NPT to encode a gray scale watermarking logo image or text, into a host image at any location. This paper presents efficient non-blind and quasi-blind watermark extraction techniques. In the quasi blind case, the extraction algorithm requires only very few information about the original image that is already conveyed by the watermarked image. Moreover, the proposed scheme does not introduce visual quality degradation into the host image. The performance and robustness of the proposed technique are tested by applying common image-processing operations such as cropping, noise degradation, and image compression. A quantitative measure is proposed to objectify performance; under this measure, the proposed technique outperforms most of the recent techniques in most cases.

The Natural Preserve Transform (NPT) has been presented as a tool for fuzzy logic watermarking. This paper describes a new image watermarking technique based on Naturalness Preserving Transform (NPT). The proposed watermarking scheme uses NPT to encode a gray scale watermarking logo image or text, into a host image at any location. This paper presents efficient non-blind and quasi-blind watermark extraction techniques. In the quasi blind case, the extraction algorithm requires only very few information about the original image that is already conveyed by the watermarked image. Moreover, the proposed scheme does not introduce visual quality degradation into the host image. The performance and robustness of the proposed technique are tested by applying common image-processing operations such as cropping, noise degradation, and image compression. A quantitative measure is proposed to objectify performance; under this measure, the proposed technique outperforms most of the recent techniques in most cases.

The Natural Preserve Transform (NPT) has been presented as a tool for fuzzy logic watermarking. This paper describes a new image watermarking technique based on Naturalness Preserving Transform (NPT). The proposed watermarking scheme uses NPT to encode a gray scale watermarking logo image or text, into a host image at any location. This paper presents efficient non-blind and quasi-blind watermark extraction techniques. In the quasi blind case, the extraction algorithm requires only very few information about the original image that is already conveyed by the watermarked image. Moreover, the proposed scheme does not introduce visual quality degradation into the host image. The performance and robustness of the proposed technique are tested by applying common image-processing operations such as cropping, noise degradation, and image compression. A quantitative measure is proposed to objectify performance; under this measure, the proposed technique outperforms most of the recent techniques in most cases. We also implemented the proposed technique on a hardware platform, digital signal processor (DSK 6713). Simulation and implementation results are illustrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

The B-spline mathematical functions have long been utilized for signal representation, zooming and interpolation. However they have not been investigated for different image coding applications. In spite of the fact that B-splines are a semi-orthogonal basis (not full orthogonal) they still can be utilized for redundancy removal and decorrelation maximization prior to any compression scheme. This is due to their distinctive feature of preserving energy in low frequencies. In this paper we propose a novel technique for preprocessing signals/images prior to the decomposition stage in different image coders based on the B-spline decomposition. Mathematical explanation and derivation for the proposed B-spline decomposition basis is presented and analyzed. We derive our theoretic/mathematical justification, through some Eigen analysis calculations, for the enhancement in compression performance achieved with our B-spline based compression approach. We also present a straightforward approach for calculating the B-spline basis in a fast and efficient manner. Extensive simulations have been carried out on the well known SPIHT image coder with and without the proposed correlation removal methodology. Simulation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique are presented.

In this paper, efficient one-dimensional (1-D) fast integer transform algorithm of the DCT matrix for the H.265 standard is proposed. Based on the symmetric property of the integer transform matrix and the matrix operations, along with using the dyadic symmetry modification on the standard matrix, the efficient fast 1-D integer transform algorithm is developed. Therefore, the computational complexities of the proposed fast integer transform are smaller than those of the direct method. In addition to computational complexity reduction the proposed algorithms provides transformation quality improvement. With lower complexity and better transformation quality, the proposed fast algorithm is suitable to accelerate the quality-demanding video coding computations

In this paper, we propose a VC-1 zero block detection method, for very low bit-rate applications that skip the transform operation for detected zero blocks. The proposed method works during the process of motion search for inter frame coding, by comparing the SAD of each residual block to two thresholds based on a value related to the QP, resulting in a two-option method for each threshold; where the 1st is for preserving quality, and the 2nd is for saving time. Normally VC-1 skips the quantization operation for detected zero blocks. In addition when a MB (macro-block) is detected as a zero MB, meaning that all 6 blocks in a MB are zeros; VC-1 signals this MB as a skipped MB, where it’s treated differently and many processes are skipped on the MB layer. For that reason, the proposed method is enhanced again with skipping the transform operation, but for MBs with five zero blocks. Meaning that a 6th non-zero block in the MB will be a zero block, and the whole MB will then be signaled as a skipped MB. Loosing the information of the non-zero block, adds quality degradation, but compression takes place more effectively. Among the four sequences tested the Hall showed the best results with up to 73.55%, 78.00%, and 88.91% of the original file size, encoding, and decoding times respectively. On the other hand, the quality degraded, as was expected, with a maximum average PSNR by 5.3 dB for the Hall sequence and 3.4 dB in the Foreman sequence.