Seung-Soo Han

A blind watermarking technique using wavelet transform

In this paper, we propose an effective watermarking algorithm for copyright protection. This is a blind watermarking which can confirm the copyright without the original image. The original image is transformed using wavelet transform and flags are created with the secret key. The secret key is the thing we need to extract the flags and compare the extracted flags with the original flags that are created during the watermark embedding procedure. To criticize the robustness of this scheme we compared the extracted flag with the original flag after several attacks such as JPEG compression, collusion, resize and noise addition. The results show that the proposed watermarking algorithm has excellent robustness against various watermark attacks with the high quality of the watermarked image.

Medical Image Authentication Using Hash Function and Integer Wavelet Transform

In this paper, a new fragile watermarking algorithm for medical images is proposed. This algorithm makes it possible to resolve the security and forgery problem of the medical images. Instead of the discrete wavelet transform, an integer wavelet transform is used to utilize hash function. The watermark associated with the hash values is inserted into the LSBs of the integer wavelet transform coefficients. From the experimental results, it can be confirmed that the proposed algorithm detects a forged area of the image very well.

Low-power High-throughput Deblocking Filter Architecture for H.264/AVC

The paper proposes an efficient deblocking filter architecture for H.264/AVC. A four-stage pipeline has been adopted to boost the speed of deblocking filter process up to 192 clock cycles per one macroblock. Hybrid edge filter order enhances the reusability of intermediate data which not only increases system throughput, but also reduces power consumption because of diminishing memory access times. In addition, for saving power purpose, our architecture utilizes the buffers instead of SRAM on-chip for storing temporary data. Experimental results show that our design can achieve the throughput of 1146kMB/s while saving up to 25% power consumption when compared with previous design. The architecture is implemented in 0.18µm standard cell library, consumes 26.01 K gates at a clock frequency of 220MHz.

A deep learning methodology to proliferate golden signoff timing

Signoff timing analysis remains a critical element in the IC design flow. Multiple signoff corners, libraries, design methodologies, and implementation flows make timing closure very complex at advanced technology nodes. Design teams often wish to ensure that one tools timing reports are neither optimistic nor pessimistic with respect to another tools reports. The resulting “correlation” problem is highly complex because tools contain millions of lines of black-box and legacy code, licenses prevent any reverse-engineering of algorithms, and the nature of the problem is seemingly “unbounded” across possible designs, timing paths, and electrical parameters. In this work, we apply a “big-data” approach to the timer correlation problem. We develop a machine learning-based tool, Golden Timer eXtension (GTX), to correct divergence in flip-flop setup time, cell arc delay, wire delay, stage delay, and path slack at timing endpoints between timers. We propose a methodology to apply GTX to two arbitrary timers, and we evaluate scalability of GTX across multiple designs and foundry technologies / libraries, both with and without signal integrity analysis. Our experimental results show reduction in divergence between timing tools from 139.3ps to 21.1ps (i.e., 6.6×) in endpoint slack, and from 117ps to 23.8ps (4.9× reduction) in stage delay. We further demonstrate the incremental application of our methods so that models can be adapted to any outlier discrepancies when new designs are taped out in the same technology / library. Last, we demonstrate that GTX can also correlate timing reports between signoff and design implementation tools.

Radial Basis Function Network for Endpoint Detection in Plasma Etch Process

In the semiconductor manufacturing process, the endpoint of plasma etch process can be determined by the graphics based detection in order to avoid the loss of over-etching and under-etching. Our approach in current study can be conducted as one way to real-time monitor and judge the endpoint instead of observing it manually. When the endpoint occurs, this system can improve the etch processes and provide instant shutdown recommendations. This method makes use of Radial Basis Function (RBF) network’s functional approximation in time-series modeling and in pattern classification. By training with enough samples, the judge will be more accurate. All the samples are probed with optical emission spectroscopy (OES) sensor in real plasma etch process and for both network training and test.

Extraction of 3D Line Segment Using Digital Elevation Data

3D line segment can be regarded as one of the most useful features in constructing 3D model. In this context, this paper presents a new 3D line segment extraction method by using line fitting of elevation data on 2D line coordinates of ortho-image. In order to use elevation in line fitting, the elevation itself should be reliable. To measure the reliability of elevation, in this paper, we employ the concept of self-consistency. We test the effectiveness of the proposed method with a quantitative accuracy analysis using synthetic images generated from Avenches data set of Ascona aerial images. Experimental results indicate that our method generates 3D line segments almost 10 times more accurate than raw elevations obtained by area-based method.

A Digital Audio Watermarking Using Two Masking Effects

In this paper, a new digital audio watermarking algorithm is presented. The proposed algorithm embeds watermark by eliminating some frequency information of audio signal based on human auditory system (HAS). This algorithm is a blind audio watermarking method, which does not require any prior information during watermark extraction process. In this paper, two masking effects are used for audio watermarking, frequency-domain masking effect and time-domain masking effect. This algorithm finds watermarking position using time-domain masking effect and embeds/detects the watermark using frequency-domain masking effect. Detection of embedded watermark is obtained by finding the eliminated frequency using band-pass filter. By using the two masking effects, the degradation of the audio quality can be minimized. It is confirmed that the proposed algorithm has robustness against various attacks such as cropping, down sampling, time stretch, MPEG1-layer3, and MPEG2-AAC compression with good audio quality.

2D Line Matching Using Geometric and Intensity Data

We present a stereo matching method of 2D line segments for the detection of 3D line segment. Stereo line matching is a difficult task, since it relies on incomplete 2D line data. The proposed matching method is based on geometric and intensity information of 2D line segment. A set of line attributes is used to match a pair of 2D lines. Line attributes consist of intensity information and geometric information including length, orientation, and endpoint position. Multi-threshold technique has been employed in the implementation of the proposed method so that flexible and efficient matching capability can be attained. Aerial and satellite images are used for the experiments of the proposed method. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method generates accurate 3D line segments from aerial and satellite images.

Watermarking techniques using the Drawing Exchange Format (DXF) file

This paper presents an algorithm of the watermark insertion and extraction on the vector image. Most parts of the vector image consist of the array of the coordinate values. The vector watermarking method by Sakamoto et al [1] uses the mask within which all the coordinate values of all the vertices are changed depending on the value of the watermark. The proposed algorithm is the change of the vector image file instead of the change of the coordinate values on the vector image. We use the Drawing Exchange Format (DXF) files since the DXF file is one of the general files in the field of the vector image. The advantage of the proposed watermarking insertion methods is that the image after the watermarking insertion process is the same as the original vector image.

Parallel Integer Motion Estimation Method by Using Reference Blocks Shared for HD Video Encloding

In this paper, we propose a parallel integer motion estimation method using reference blocks shared for HD video encoding. The proposed method uses a reference block to perform motion estimation with several current blocks. We achieved 100 times lower memory access rate than a full search algorithm and we demonstrated that the proposed method is a 30-fps solution of HD video at 106MHz with 600K gate counts and 80Kbit on-chip memory