Anca Pascu

A Novel Cryptographic Encryption Technique for Securing Digital Images in the Cloud Using AES and RGB Pixel Displacement

In todays cyberspace, Information security plays an active role in ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of data transmission or storage. One of the foremost fears with the rapid increment of adoption of data storage in the cloud environment is data security. Media contents such as images and video recordings needed to be highly encrypted without any loss of information during the encryption and the decryption process. Contents such as medical images, surveillance images, personal photos, etc needed to be well protected. This paper proposes a hybrid approach of encryption of images using an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and an RGB cryptographic technique. The Method made use of AES for the generation of a shared secret key which is then used by the visual cryptographic algorithm for the encryption process. The encryption is done solely based on RGB pixel shuffling and displacement. At the end of the process, there was no pixel expansion hence there was no loss in image quality. The programming and simulation of the processes as well as the analysis of the results were done using MATLAB.

Logic of Determination of Objects (LDO): How to Articulate “Extension” with “Intension” and “Objects” with “Concepts”

From a logical viewpoint, object is never defined, even by a negative definition. This paper is a theoretical contribution about object using a new constructivist logical approach called Logic of Determination of Objects founded on a basic operation, called determination. This new logic takes into account cognitive problems such as the inheritance of properties by non typical occurrences or by indeterminate atypical objects in opposition to prototypes that are typical completely determinate objects. We show how extensional classes, intensions, more and less determined objects, more or less typical representatives of a concept and prototypes are defined and organized, using a determination operation that constructs a class of indeterminate objects from an object representation of a concept called typical object.

A robust associative watermarking technique based on frequent pattern mining and texture analysis

Nowadays, the principle of image mining plays a vital role in various areas of our life, where numerous frameworks based on image mining are proposed for object recognition, object tracking, sensing images and medical image diagnosis. Nevertheless, the research in the image authentication based on image mining is still confined. Therefore, this paper comes to present an efficient engagement between the frequent pattern mining and digital watermarking to contribute significantly in the authentication of images transmitted via public networks. The proposed framework exploits some robust features of image to extract the frequent patterns in the image data. The maximal relevant patterns are used to discriminate between the textured and smooth blocks within the image, where the texture blocks are more appropriate to embed the secret data than smooth blocks. The experiments result proves the efficiency of the proposed framework in terms of stabilization and robustness against different kind of attacks. The results are interesting and remarkable to preserve the image authentication.

JPEG bitstream based integrity with lightweight complexity of medical image in WMSNS environment

The study aims to preserve integrity of JPEG bitstream transmitted in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) environment, lightweight complex process that is proposed to parse bitstream of encoded medical image and formulated the encryption process for that represented bit of Diff value in DC coefficients rather than appended bits of ACs coefficients. Our choice deals with low down complexity by encrypting limited numbers of DC coefficients versus ACs coefficients per block, or even all image blocks. This model may be utilized in building a secure framework of remote image analysis and archiving center for that transmitted medical images from body sensors and clinician, or even other remote imaging center with high integrity and low complexity. The experiments result shows that the proposed approach gives an interesting and remarkable result to preserve the medical image integrity. The obtained results are discussed in details.

A Security Technique for Authentication and Security of Medical Images in Health Information Systems

Medical images stored in health information systems, cloud or other systems are of key importance. Privacy and security needs to be guaranteed for such images through encryption and authentication processes. Encrypted and watermarked images in this domain needed to be reversible so that the plain image operated on in the encryption and watermarking process can be fully recoverable due to the sensitivity of the data conveyed in medical images. In this paper, we proposed a fully recoverable encrypted and watermarked image processing technique for the security of medical images in health information systems. The approach is used to authenticate and secure the medical images. Our results showed to be very effective and reliable for fully recoverable images.

Motion JPEG Video Authentication Based on Quantization Matrix Watermarking: Application in Robotics

The images authentication transmitted through the communication networks must verify the proof of the originality and robustness against the hacker attacks. The existing techniques such as the cryptographic methods are not sufficient. An effectiveness and robust solution is proposed in this paper. This solution is based on the watermarking of the video and especially the Motion JPEG stream. We focused on one of the major properties of the JPEG image which is the quantization matrix. The watermarking is performed on this matrix. We detail the obtained results against several attacks.

Aspecto-Temporal Meanings Analysed by Combinatory Logic

What is the meaning of language expressions and how to compute or calculate it? In this paper, we give an answer to this question by analysing the meanings of aspects and tenses in natural languages inside the formal model of an grammar of applicative, cognitive and enunciative operations (GRACE) (Desclés and Ro in Math Sci Hum 194:39–70, 2011), using the applicative formalism, functional types of categorial grammars and combinatory logic (CL) (Curry and Feys in Combinatory Logic. North-Holland Publishing, Amsterdam, 1958). In the enunciative theory (Benveniste in Problèmes de linguistique générale, 1, 2. Gallimard, Paris, 1974; Culioli in Formalisation et opérations de repérage, tome 2. Ophrys, Paris, 1999; Desclés in Une articulation entre syntaxe et sémantique cognitive: la grammaire applicative et cognitive, mémoires de la société de linguistique de Paris, nouvelle série, tome XX, l’architecture des théories, les modules et leurs interfaces. Peeters, Louvain, 2011) and following (Bally in Linguistique générale et linguistique française. Berne, Franke, 1965), an utterance can be decomposed into two components: a modus and a dictum (or a proposition). In GRACE, the modus is a complex operator applied to a proposition (a dictum) and is generated from more elementary operators of the categories of tense, aspect, and modality. The dictum is a proposition generated by a predicative relation. In this way, we can attribute a semantic meaning to different grammatical aspecto-temporal operators. The applicative expressions of CL can be easily translated into a functional programming language such as HASKELL or CAML (Ro in Les référentiels et opérateurs aspecto-temporels: définitions, formalisation logique et informatique. PhD thesis, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, 2012).

The Cube Generalizing Aristotle’s Square in Logic of Determination of Objects (LDO)

In this paper we present a generalization of Aristotle’s square to a cube, in the framework of an extended quantification theory defined within the Logic of Determination of Objects (LDO). The Aristotle’s square is an image which makes the link between quantifier operators and negation in the First Order Predicate Language (FOPL). However, the FOPL quantification is not sufficient to capture the “meaning” of all quantified expressions in natural languages. There are some expressions in natural languages which encode a quantification on typical objects. This is the reason why we want to construct a logic of objects with typical and atypical objects. The Logic of Determination of Objects (LDO) (Descles and Pascu, Logica Univers. 5(1):75–89, 2011) is a new logic defined within the framework of Combinatory Logic (Curry and Feys, Combinatory Logic I, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1958) with functional types. LDO basically deals with two fundamental classes: a class of concepts (\(\mathcal{F}\)) and a class of objects (\(\mathcal{O}\)). LDO captures two kinds of objects: typical objects and atypical objects. They are defined by the means of other primitive notions: the intension of the concept f (\(\operatorname{Int}f\)), the essence of a concept f (\(\operatorname{Ess}f\)), the expanse of the concept f (\(\operatorname{Exp}f\)), the extension of the concept f (\(\operatorname{Ext}f\)). Typical objects in \(\operatorname{Exp}f\) inherit all concepts of \(\operatorname{Int}f\); atypical objects in \(\operatorname{Exp}f\) inherit only some concepts of Intf. LDO makes use of all the above notions and organizes them into a system which is a logic of objects (applicative typed system in Curry’s sense—Curry and Feys, Combinatory Logic I, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1958—with some specific operators). In LDO new quantifiers are introduced and studied. They are called star quantifiers: Π⋆ and Σ⋆ (Descles and Guentcheva, in: M. Bőttner, W. Thűmmel (eds.), Variable-Free Semantics, pp. 210–233, Secolo, Osnabrűck, 2000). They have a connection with classical quantifiers. They are considered as the determiners of objects of \(\operatorname{Exp}f\). They are different from the usual quantifiers Π and Σ expressed in the illative Curry version (Curry and Feys, Combinatory Logic I, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1958) of Frege’s quantifiers. They are defined inside the Combinatory Logical formalism (Curry and Feys, Combinatory Logic I, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1958) starting from Π and Σ, by means of abstract operators of composition called combinators (Curry and Feys, Combinatory Logic I, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1958). The system of four quantifiers Π, Σ, Π⋆ and Σ⋆ captures the extended quantification that means quantification on typical/atypical objects. The cube generalizing the Aristotle’s square visualizes the relations between quantifiers Π, Σ, Π⋆ and Σ⋆ and the negation.