Robust patchwork-based watermarking method for stereo audio signals

This paper presents a patchwork-based watermarking method for stereo audio signals, which exploits the similarity of the two sound channels of stereo signals. Given a segment of stereo signal, we first compute the discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) of the two sound channels, which yields two sets of DFT coefficients. The DFT coefficients corresponding to certain frequency range are divided into multiple subsegment pairs and a criterion is proposed to select those suitable for watermark embedding. Then a watermark is embedded into the selected subsegment pairs by modifying their DFT coefficients. The exact way of modification is determined by a secret key, the watermark to be embedded, and the DFT coefficients themselves. In the decoding process, the subsegment pairs containing watermarks are identified by another criterion. Then the secret key is used to extract the watermark from the watermarked subsegments. Compared to the existing patchwork methods for audio watermarking, the proposed method does not require knowledge of which segments of the watermarked audio signal contain watermarks and is more robust to conventional attacks.

Iranian women's sports fandom : gender, resistance, and identity in the football movie offside

As sport enters new global territories, attending to questions of cultural difference is increasingly important to studies of women’s sports fanship. This article draws on theories of transnational feminism and feminist sports scholarship to contemplate the cinematic portrayal of the non-Western female football supporter. Women sports fans rarely appear as film protagonists, with the notable exception of the 2006 movie Offside, which tells the story of Iranian women soccer fans attending a World Cup qualifying match. By focusing on the ways that women fans negotiate their marginal status in the sporting arena, I argue that the film unsettles cultural associations between masculinity and football in Iran, and confounds the oppositional construction of the “other” woman as a passive victim of, or freedom fighter against, Islam. 

Patchwork-based audio watermarking method robust to de-synchronization attacks

This paper presents a patchwork-based audio watermarking method to resist de-synchronization attacks such as pitch-scaling, time-scaling, and jitter attacks. At the embedding stage, the watermarks are embedded into the host audio signal in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. Then, a set of synchronization bits are implanted into the watermarked signal in the logarithmic DCT (LDCT) domain. At the decoding stage, we analyze the received audio signal in the LDCT domain to find the scaling factor imposed by an attack. Then, we modify the received signal to remove the scaling effect, together with the embedded synchronization bits. After that, watermarks are extracted from the modified signal. Simulation results show that at the embedding rate of 10 bps, the proposed method achieves 98.9% detection rate on average under the considered de-synchronization attacks. At the embedding rate of 16 bps, it can still obtain 94.7% detection rate on average. So, the proposed method is much more robust to de-synchronization attacks than other patchwork watermarking methods. Compared with the audio watermarking methods designed for tackling de-synchronization attacks, our method has much higher embedding capacity.

Robustness enhancement of quantization based audio watermarking method using adaptive safe-band

This paper presents a novel adaptive safe-band for quantization based audio watermarking methods, aiming to improve robustness. Considerable number of audio watermarking methods have been developed using quantization based techniques. These techniques are generally vulnerable to signal processing attacks. For these conventional quantization based techniques, robustness can be marginally improved by choosing larger step sizes at the cost of significant perceptual quality degradation. We first introduce fixed size safe-band between two quantization steps to improve robustness. This safe-band will act as a buffer to withstand certain types of attacks. Then we further improve the robustness by adaptively changing the size of the safe-band based on the audio signal feature used for watermarking. Compared with conventional quantization based method and the fixed size safe-band based method, the proposed adaptive safe-band based quantization method is more robust to attacks. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated by simulation results. © 2014 IEEE.

Tracks to advocacy: journalism studies, animal rights and Australian media law

This article considers the role of animal rights-based journalism and its connection to teaching media law and ethics to undergraduate students in an Australian university arts faculty. An anecdotal discussion of a reflective practice informing the teaching of an undergraduate course in a journalism major relates questions of ethics and law to broader considerations of the role of advocacy in and around journalism, and media practice. It is argued that animal rights-related stories have a role in training media professionals, and also in inspiring journalists to envision their own work as part of the democratic mechanisms of social and legal reform in Australia.

Sugar and spice: the golden age of the Hindi movie vamps, 1960s-70s

How do we define the globalized cinema and media cultures of Bollywood in an age when it has become part of the cultural diplomacy of an emerging superpower? Is it still an 'other' industry in a world dominated by Hollywood? Bollywood and Its Other(s) aims to compensate for the lack of scholarly literature on Indian film by opening up hitherto unexplored sites or sites that are in formation. It focuses on the aesthetic-philosophical questions of the other, Indian diaspora's negotiations with national identity, alternative reading strategies/research methods, marginal genres (sci-fi, horror), marginal characters (flaneuse, vamps), marginal gender (non-normative sexualities), marginal cinema (Hindi avant-garde), marginal language (Hinglish), and marginal regions (the Kashmir valley). It intends to address film scholars, South Asian studies researchers, cinephiles and lay readers alike.

Spread spectrum-based high embedding capacity watermarking method for audio signals

Abstract— Audio watermarking is a promising technology for copyright protection of audio data. Built upon the concept of spread spectrum (SS), many SS-based audio watermarking method shave been developed, where a pseudonoise (PN) sequence is usually used to introduce security. A major drawback of the existing SS-based audio watermarking methods is their low embedding capacity. In this paper, we propose a new SS-based audio watermarking method which possesses much higher embedding capacity while ensuring satisfactory imperceptibility and robustness. The high embedding capacity is achieved through a set of mechanisms: embedding multiple watermark bits in one audio segment, reducing host signal interference on watermark extraction, and adaptively adjusting PN sequence amplitude in watermark embedding based on the property of audio segments. The effectiveness of the proposed audio watermarking method is demonstrated by simulation examples.

An audio signal based model for condition monitoring of sheet metal stamping process

Tool condition monitoring is an important factor in ensuring manufacturing efficiency and product quality. Audio signal based methods are a promising technique for condition monitoring. However, the influence of interfering signals and background noise has hindered the use of this technique in production sites. Blind signal separation (BSS) has the potential to solve this problem by recovering the signal of interest out of the observed mixtures, given that the knowledge about the BSS model is available. In this paper, we discuss the development of the BSS model for sheet metal stamping with a mechanical press system, so that the BSS techniques based on this model can be developed in future. This involves conducting a set of specially designed machine operations and developing a novel signal extraction technique. Also, the link between stamping process conditions and the extracted audio signal associated with stamping was successfully demonstrated by conducting a series of trials with different lubrication conditions and levels of tool wear.

Modelling personal preferences for Top-N movie recommendations

Modelling the temporal dynamics of personal preferences is still under-developed despite the rapid development of personalization. In this paper, we observe that the user preference styles tend to change regularly following certain patterns in the context of movie recommendation systems. Therefore, we propose a Preference Pattern model to capture the user preference styles and their temporal dynamics, and apply this model to improve the accuracy of the Top-N movie recommendations. Precisely, a preference pattern is defined as a set of user preference styles sorted in a time order. The basic idea is to model user preference styles and their temporal dynamics by constructing a representative subspace with an Expectation-Maximization (EM)-like algorithm, which works in an iterative fashion by refining the global and the personal preference styles simultaneously. Then, the degree which the recommendations match the active user's preference styles, can be estimated by measuring its reconstruction error from its projection on the representative subspace. The experiment results indicate that the proposed model is robust to the data sparsity problem, and can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms on the Top-N movie recommendations in terms of accuracy.