Jeng-Shyang Pan

Genetic watermarking based on transform-domain techniques

Abstract An innovative watermarking scheme based on genetic algorithms (GA) in the transform domain is proposed. It is robust against watermarking attacks, which are commonly employed in the literature. In addition, the watermarked image quality is also considered. In this paper, we employ GA for optimizing both the fundamentally conflicting requirements. Watermarking with GA is easy for implementation. We also examine the effectiveness of our scheme by checking the fitness function in GA, which includes both factors related to robustness and invisibility. Simulation results also show both the robustness under attacks, and the improvement in watermarked image quality with GA.

Diversity enhanced particle swarm optimization with neighborhood search

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has shown an effective performance for solving variant benchmark and real-world optimization problems. However, it suffers from premature convergence because of quick losing of diversity. In order to enhance its performance, this paper proposes a hybrid PSO algorithm, called DNSPSO, which employs a diversity enhancing mechanism and neighborhood search strategies to achieve a trade-off between exploration and exploitation abilities. A comprehensive experimental study is conducted on a set of benchmark functions, including rotated multimodal and shifted high-dimensional problems. Comparison results show that DNSPSO obtains a promising performance on the majority of the test problems.

ENHANCED ARTIFICIAL BEE COLONY OPTIMIZATION

The complete mitochondrial DNA D‐loop structure of pigeon (Columba livia) was established in this study. A strategy of amplifying three partial fragments of the D‐loop and then combing the three fragments to cover the full length of the D‐loop was adopted. Ten samples from pigeons were collected and were successfully amplified and sequenced. Repetitive sequences of a VNTR and an STR were both observed at the 3′‐end of D‐loop region. DNA sequence data revealed polymorphic sequences including indels, SNP, VNTR and STR within the D‐loop. The size of the D‐loop ranged from 1310 to 1327 bp from the initiation site of D‐loop to the site immediately upstream of the repeat sequences depending upon the number of insertions or deletions. Each sample could be distinguished based on four genotyping procedures; being indels, SNPs, VNTRs and STRs. The polymorphic nature of the D‐loop can be a valuable method for maternal identification and genetic linkage of pigeon in particular forensic science investigations.

Reversible Watermarking Based on Invariability and Adjustment on Pixel Pairs

A novel reversible data hiding scheme based on invariability of the sum of pixel pairs and pairwise difference adjustment (PDA) is presented in this letter. For each pixel pair, if a certain value is added to one pixel while the same value is subtracted from the other, then the sum of these two pixels will remain unchanged. How to properly select this value is the key issue for the balance between reversibility and distortion. In this letter, half the difference of a pixel pair plus 1-bit watermark has been elaborately selected to satisfy this purpose. In addition, PDA is proposed to significantly reduce the capacity consumed by overhead information. A series of experiments is conducted to verify the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach.

Ant colony system with communication strategies

In this paper an ant colony system (ACS) with communication strategies is developed. The artificial ants are partitioned into several groups. Seven communication methods for updating the pheromone level between groups in ACS are proposed and work on the traveling salesman problem using our system is presented. Experimental results based on three well-known traveling salesman data sets demonstrate the proposed ACS with communication strategies are superior to the existing ant colony system (ACS) and ant system (AS) with similar or better running times.

An efficient encoding algorithm for vector quantization based on subvector technique

In this paper, a new and fast encoding algorithm for vector quantization is presented. This algorithm makes full use of two characteristics of a vector: the sum and the variance. A vector is separated into two subvectors: one is composed of the first half of vector components and the other consists of the remaining vector components. Three inequalities based on the sums and variances of a vector and its two subvectors components are introduced to reject those codewords that are impossible to be the nearest codeword, thereby saving a great deal of computational time, while introducing no extra distortion compared to the conventional full search algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is faster than the equal-average nearest neighbor search (ENNS), the improved ENNS, the equal-average equal-variance nearest neighbor search (EENNS) and the improved EENNS algorithms. Comparing with the improved EENNS algorithm, the proposed algorithm reduces the computational time and the number of distortion calculations by 2.4% to 6% and 20.5% to 26.8%, respectively. The average improvements of the computational time and the number of distortion calculations are 4% and 24.6% for the codebook sizes of 128 to 1024, respectively.

Kernel class-wise locality preserving projection

In the recent years, the pattern recognition community paid more attention to a new kind of feature extraction method, the manifold learning methods, which attempt to project the original data into a lower dimensional feature space by preserving the local neighborhood structure. Among them, locality preserving projection (LPP) is one of the most promising feature extraction techniques. However, when LPP is applied to the classification tasks, it shows some limitations, such as the ignorance of the label information. In this paper, we propose a novel local structure based feature extraction method, called class-wise locality preserving projection (CLPP). CLPP utilizes class information to guide the procedure of feature extraction. In CLPP, the local structure of the original data is constructed according to a certain kind of similarity between data points, which takes special consideration of both the local information and the class information. The kernelized (nonlinear) counterpart of this linear feature extractor is also established in the paper. Moreover, a kernel version of CLPP namely Kernel CLPP (KCLPP) is developed through applying the kernel trick to CLPP to increase its performance on nonlinear feature extraction. Experiments on ORL face database and YALE face database are performed to test and evaluate the proposed algorithm.

An improved vector particle swarm optimization for constrained optimization problems

Increasing attention is being paid to solve constrained optimization problems (COP) frequently encountered in real-world applications. In this paper, an improved vector particle swarm optimization (IVPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve COPs. The constraint-handling technique is based on the simple constraint-preserving method. Velocity and position of each particle, as well as the corresponding changes, are all expressed as vectors in order to present the optimization procedure in a more intuitively comprehensible manner. The NVPSO algorithm [30], which uses one-dimensional search approaches to find a new feasible position on the flying trajectory of the particle when it escapes from the feasible region, has been proposed to solve COP. Experimental results showed that searching only on the flying trajectory for a feasible position influenced the diversity of the swarm and thus reduced the global search capability of the NVPSO algorithm. In order to avoid neglecting any worthy position in the feasible region and improve the optimization efficiency, a multi-dimensional search algorithm is proposed to search within a local region for a new feasible position. The local region is composed of all dimensions of the escaped particles parent and the current positions. Obviously, the flying trajectory of the particle is also included in this local region. The new position is not only present in the feasible region but also has a better fitness value in this local region. The performance of IVPSO is tested on 13 well-known benchmark functions. Experimental results prove that the proposed IVPSO algorithm is simple, competitive and stable.

Bat Algorithm Inspired Algorithm for Solving Numerical Optimization Problems

Inspired by Bat Algorithm, a novel algorithm, which is called Evolved Bat Algorithm (EBA), for solving the numerical optimization problem is proposed based on the framework of the original bat algorithm. By reanalyzing the behavior of bats and considering the general characteristics of whole species of bat, we redefine the corresponding operation to the bats’ behaviors. EBA is a new method in the branch of swarm intelligence for solving numerical optimization problems. In order to analyze the improvement on the accuracy of finding the near best solution and the reduction in the computational cost, three well-known and commonly used test functions in the field of swarm intelligence for testing the accuracy and the performance of the algorithm, are used in the experiments. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method improves at least 99.42% on the accuracy of finding the near best solution and reduces 6.07% in average, simultaneously, on the computational time than the original bat algorithm.

Cat swarm optimization

In this paper, we present a new algorithm of swarm intelligence, namely, Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO). CSO is generated by observing the behaviors of cats, and composed of two sub-models, i.e., tracing mode and seeking mode, which model upon the behaviors of cats. Experimental results using six test functions demonstrate that CSO has much better performance than Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO).