Junaid Jameel Ahmad

Energy efficient video compression for wireless sensor networks

Wireless video sensor networks are anticipated to be deployed to monitor remote geographical areas. To save energy in bit transmissions/receptions over a video sensor network, the captured video content needs to be encoded before its transmission to the base station. However, video encoding is an inherently complex operation that can cause a major energy drain at battery-constrained sensors. Thus a systematic evaluation of different video encoding options is required to allow a designer to choose the most energy-efficient compression technique for a given video sensing application scenario. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the energy efficiencies of predictive and distributed video coding paradigms for deployment on real-life sensor motes. For predictive video coding, our results show that despite its higher compression efficiency, inter video coding always depletes much more energy than intra coding. Therefore, we propose to use image compression based intra coding to improve energy efficiency in the predictive video coding paradigm. For distributed video coding, our results show that the Wyner-Ziv encoder has consistently better energy efficiency than the PRISM encoder. We propose minor modifications to PRISM and Wyner-Ziv encoders which significantly reduce the energy consumption of these encoders. For all the video encoding configurations evaluated in this paper, our results reveal the counter-intuitive and important finding that the major source of energy drain in WSNs is local computations performed for video compression and not video transmission.

An improved DC recovery method from AC coefficients of DCT-transformed images

Motivated by the work of Uehara et al. [1], an improved method to recover DC coefficients from AC coefficients of DCT-transformed images is investigated in this work, which finds applications in cryptanalysis of selective multimedia encryption. The proposed under/over-flow rate minimization (FRM) method employs an optimization process to get a statistically more accurate estimation of unknown DC coefficients, thus achieving a better recovery performance. It was shown by experimental results based on 200 test images that the proposed DC recovery method significantly improves the quality of most recovered images in terms of the PSNR values and several state-of-the-art objective image quality assessment (IQA) metrics such as SSIM and MS-SSIM.

Energy and distortion analysis of video compression schemes for Wireless Video Sensor Networks

Wireless Video Sensor Networks (WVSNs) - a type of WSNs - comprise of sensor nodes that can capture, process and communicate video frames. The battery powered sensor nodes have limited hardware resources while video processing and communication are resource intensive tasks i.e., require high-end processors, large memory and bandwidth. Video encoding is a popular method used to reduce the communication overhead but being an inherently complex process it results in higher computational energy-drain on video sensor nodes. This establishes an interesting computation-communication tradeoff for energy efficient video communication (encoding and transmission) in WVSNs. In this paper, we study this computation-communication tradeoff under Intel-imote2 based single-hop and multi-hop video sensor networks testbed by empirically evaluating selected implementations of the MPEG-4 (Part 2) and H.264/AVC encoders. The analysis has been carried out to characterize the performance of encoders in terms of energy efficiency, compression efficiency and video distortion. The experimental results show that in single-hop WVSNs, MPEG-4 is energy efficient over H.264 whilst in multi-hop WVSNs, H.264 is energy efficient over MPEG-4.

Secure computing with the MPEG RVC framework

Recently, ISO/IEC standardized a dataflow-programming framework called Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) for the specification of video codecs. The RVC framework aims at providing the specification of a system at a high abstraction level so that the functionality (or behavior) of the system become independent of implementation details. The idea is to specify a system so that only intrinsic features of the algorithms are explicitly expressed, whereas implementation choices can then be made only once specific target platforms have been chosen. With this system design approach, one abstract design can be used to automatically create implementations towards multiple target platforms. In this paper, we report our investigations on applying the methodology standardized by the MPEG RVC framework to develop secure computing in the domains of cryptography and multimedia security, leading to the conclusion that the RVC framework can successfully be applied as a general-purpose framework to other fields beyond multimedia coding. This paper also highlights the challenges we faced in conducting our study, and how our study helped the RVC and the secure computing communities benefited from each other. Our investigations started with the development of a Crypto Tools Library (CTL) based on RVC, which covers a number of widely used ciphers and cryptographic hash functions such as AES, Triple DES, ARC4 and SHA-2. Performance benchmarking results on the RVC-based AES and SHA-2 implementations in both C and Java revealed that the automatically generated implementations can achieve a comparable performance to some manually written reference implementations. We also demonstrated that the RVC framework can easily produce implementations with multi-core support without any change to the RVC code. A security protocol for mutual authentication was also implemented to demonstrate how one can build heterogeneous systems easily with RVC. By combining CTL with Video Tool Library (a standard library defined by the RVC standard), a non-standard RVC-based H.264/AVC encoder and a non-standard RVC-based JPEG codec, we further demonstrated the benefits of using RVC to develop different kinds of multimedia security applications, which include joint multimedia encryption-compression schemes, digital watermarking and image steganography in JPEG compressed domain. Our study has shown that RVC can be used as a general-purpose implementation-independent development framework for diverse data-driven applications with different complexities.

CTL: A Platform-Independent Crypto Tools Library Based on Dataflow Programming Paradigm

The diversity of computing platforms is increasing rapidly. In order to allow security applications to run on such diverse platforms, implementing and optimizing the same cryptographic primitives for multiple target platforms and heterogeneous systems can result in high costs. In this paper, we report our efforts in developing and benchmarking a platform-independent Crypto Tools Library (CTL). CTL is based on a dataflow programming framework called Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC), which was recently standardized by ISO/IEC for building complicated reconfigurable video codecs. CTL benefits from various properties of the RVC framework including tools to 1) simulate the platform-independent designs, 2) automatically generate implementations in different target programming languages (e.g., C/C++, Java, LLVM, and Verilog/VHDL) for deployment on different platforms as software and/or hardware modules, and 3) design space exploitation such as automatic parallelization for multi- and many-core systems. We benchmarked the performance of the SHA-256 implementation in CTL on single-core target platforms and demonstrated that implementations automatically generated from platform-independent RVC applications can achieve a run-time performance comparable to reference implementations manually written in C and Java. For a quad-core target platform, we benchmarked a 4-adic hash tree application based on SHA-256 that achieves a performance gain of up to 300% for hashing messages of size 8 MB.

Building multimedia security applications in the MPEG reconfigurable video coding (RVC) framework

Although used by most of system developers, imperative languages are known for not being able to provide easily reconfigurable, platform independent and strictly modular applications. ISO/IEC has recently developed a new video coding standard called Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC), with the objective of providing modular and concurrent specifications of complex video codecs that constitute a better starting point for implementation of applications using video compression. Multimedia security applications are traditionally developed in imperative languages mainly because the required multimedia codecs were only available in specification and implementations based on imperative languages. Therefore, aside from the technical challenges inherited from multimedia codecs, multimedia security applications also face a number of other challenges which are only specific to them. Since a number of multimedia codecs are already available in the RVC framework, multimedia security applications can now also be developed using this new development framework. This paper explains why the RVC framework approach can be used to efficiently overcome those technical challenges better than existing imperative languages. In addition, the paper demonstrates how the RVC framework can be used to quickly develop multimedia security applications by presenting some examples including a joint H.264/AVC video encryption-encoding system, a joint JPEG image encryption-encoding system and a image watermarking system in JPEG compressed-domain.

Performance estimation of program partitions on multi-core platforms

The exploration of different design configurations of dynamic dataflow programs executed on many-core or multi-core platforms is, in general, a very difficult task. Determining a close-to-optimal partitioning, scheduling and buffer dimensioning configuration, when associated with a performance optimization function, belongs to the class of NP-complete problems. In order to explore the space of feasible solutions with efficient heuristics looking for solutions of good quality, it is important to be able to evaluate the design points in terms of the performance optimization function with sufficient precision without having to physically execute the program on the platform. This paper presents a performance estimation approach and an associated SW tool capable of exploring, with a high level of accuracy, the space of feasible solutions by using only a limited set of measurements from the physical processing platform. Moreover, the estimation model allows an identification of possible improvements that can be applied to different configurations. The results reported validate the accuracy of the methodology using examples of dataflow implementations of dynamic video codec designs for two different classes of platforms: Transport Triggered Architecture and Intel platforms.

Graph-Theoretic Complexity Reduction for Markovian Wireless Channel Models

Accurate simulation and analysis of wireless networks are inherently dependent on accurate models which are able to provide real-time channel characterization. High-order Markov chains are typically used to model errors and losses over wireless channels. However, complexity (i.e., the number of states) of a high-order Markov model increases exponentially with the memory-length of the underlying channel. In this paper, we present a novel graph-theoretic methodology that uses Hamiltonian circuits to reduce the complexity of a high-order Markov model to a desired state budget. We also demonstrate the implication of unused states in complexity reduction of higher order Markov model. Our trace-driven performance evaluations for real wireless local area network (WLAN) and wireless sensor network (WSN) channels demonstrate that the proposed Hamiltonian Model, while providing orders of magnitude reduction in complexity, renders an accuracy that is comparable to the Markov model and better than the existing reduced state models.

An introduction to MPEG-G, the new ISO standard for genomic information representation

The MPEG-G standardization initiative is a coordinated international effort to specify a compressed data format that enables large scale genomic data to be processed, transported and shared. The standard consists of a set of specifications (i.e., a book) describing: i) a nor-mative format syntax, and ii) a normative decoding process to retrieve the information coded in a compliant file or bitstream. Such decoding process enables the use of leading-edge com-pression technologies that have exhibited significant compression gains over currently used formats for storage of unaligned and aligned sequencing reads. Additionally, the standard provides a wealth of much needed functionality, such as selective access, data aggregation, ap-plication programming interfaces to the compressed data, standard interfaces to support data protection mechanisms, support for streaming and a procedure to assess the conformance of implementations. ISO/IEC is engaged in supporting the maintenance and availability of the standard specification, which guarantees the perenniality of applications using MPEG-G. Fi-nally, the standard ensures interoperability and integration with existing genomic information processing pipelines by providing support for conversion from the FASTQ/SAM/BAM file formats. In this paper we provide an overview of the MPEG-G specification, with particular focus on the main advantages and novel functionality it offers. As the standard only specifies the decoding process, encoding performance, both in terms of speed and compression ratio, can vary depending on specific encoder implementations, and will likely improve during the lifetime of MPEG-G. Hence, the performance statistics provided here are only indicative baseline examples of the technologies included in the standard.

Effect of 3D models on seismic vulnerability assessment of deficient RC frame structures

ABSTRACT Earthquakes pose critical danger for seismically deficient structures. This phenomenon becomes more pronounced in underdeveloped countries where such structures are common. 2D analysis of such structures can yield reasonable results but requires very careful definition of joint constraints. However, possible shortcoming of 2D analysis is that it does not cater to the relative displacement effects of the transverse members to longitudinal, which is reasonably accommodated in 3D models. This research aims to differentiate the seismic vulnerability assessment of 2D and 3D structural models. Typical deficient three-, five- and eight-storey reinforced concrete buildings constructed in Pakistan were selected as case study and modelled as 2D and 3D structures. Static cyclic analysis was performed and seismic vulnerability assessment was carried out using the capacity spectrum method. The results are then compared with the standard Global Earthquake Safety Initiative curve for deficient structures. It is observed that 3D models are brittle, crack earlier and are more vulnerable seismically compared to their 2D counterparts. It is also concluded that 2D models are more conservative compared to 3D models in terms of seismic response.