Novel watermarking methods for copyright protection of audio signals

This research presented improved watermarking methods for mono and stereo audio signals. To enhance the performance, novel methods are developed using echo hiding techniques and patchwork-based algorithms. The superior performances of the proposed methods are demonstrated by theoretical analysis and simulation examples, in comparison with the existing methods.

Chronic disease and impairment among Alaska native elders : the Alaska Education and Research Towards Health (EARTH) study

Background: Chronic diseases and impairments are prevalent among older Americans. However, prevalence data for Alaska Native (AN) elders are limited, with estimates usually extrapolated from national studies in which AN elders may not be well-represented. The aim of this study was to describe the prevalence of selected chronic diseases, impairments, and measured medical risk factors among a large community sample of AN elders.

Methods: Design, setting, and participants. A community-based cross-sectional study of baseline information from 656 AN elders aged 55 years or over who participated in the Alaska Education and Research Towards Health (EARTH) Study, March 2004 to August 2006. Measurements. Self-reported lifetime prevalence of 17 doctor-diagnosed chronic diseases, and point prevalence of vision, hearing, oral, and general health impairment were estimated from data collected using audio computer-assisted self-administered questionnaires. In addition, height, weight, blood pressure, fasting blood lipids, and fasting blood glucose levels were measured.

Results: The four most prevalent chronic diseases among AN elders were high blood pressure (55%), arthritis (49%), high cholesterol (42%), and adult bone fracture/break (35%). The median number of chronic diseases reported was three (inter-quartile range, 2 to 5). The prevalence of self-reported vision impairment was 15%, hearing impairment 18%, and having had all natural teeth removed 25%. Almost 50% were obese. High blood pressure (systolic ≥ 140 mm Hg and/or diastolic ≥ 90 mm Hg) was measured in 23%, high low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (≥ 130 mg/dL) in 39%, and high fasting plasma glucose (> 125 mg/dL) in 9%. Obesity was more prevalent among women than men. There were also significant regional differences in rates of obesity and high LDL cholesterol.

Conclusion: These data may be useful in public health programs and health services planning.

An exploration of the impact of celebrity on the HIV/AIDS pandemic

The framework we present in this article separates into three generations the celebrity/personality involvement in the AIDS movement that has been steadily building momentum over the past 25 years. We analyze the celebrification of HIV/AIDS and the role of the media in the process. We contend the relationship between celebrity, the public and HIV/AIDS is multipurpose: celebrities maintain a positive public presence between projects while allowing themselves and their supporting fans to feel good about taking on and affecting a meaningful cause. Celebrities are vehicles and embodiments of concern that act as proxies for their various audiences. And this is their power–celebrities are embodiments of their audiences. The awareness that celebrities have brought to the HIV/AIDS epidemic has resulted in better treatment for victims and increased government support for medical research, and yet has also distracted the public’s attention from the scope of the epidemic. It is the third generation of celebrities who are refocusing efforts on worldwide prevention and a cure for HIV/AIDS.

Keeping connected: the design and overview of the research

The special issue Keeping Connected: Identity, Social Connection and Education for Young People opens with a paper that discusses the research design and overview of a three-year project by a Melbourne (Australia)-based multi-disciplinary team. Over 2007–2009, the Keeping Connected team of 10 researchers investigated the lives of adolescents with ongoing health conditions. The project centrally is developed by the young people's perspectives, their identity and wellbeing, relationships with others and engagement within changing contexts and their altered opportunities in the world. The research design includes image production underpinned by visual methods and a narrative-informed approach to interview and interpretation of images. The study, which crosses the health and education interface, set out to highlight differences of perspectives adopted by 31 young people, their families and the professional groups, such as teachers and health professionals. The special issue discusses key project findings and contributes a body of scholarship that expands our knowledge of evidence-based research across the education and health interface. The longitudinal study highlighted two themes of importance for education, and poorly catered for in current policies and guidelines: that the situation of these young people needs to be addressed by schools as a process over time (including prospectively); and that the young people's identity is strongly marked by a desire to be seen and treated as ‘normal’ combined with an awareness of being vulnerable.

Keeping connected: a review of the research relationship

In this paper, some key findings of the Keeping Connected project are discussed in light of the methodological challenges of developing an analytical approach in a large-scale study, particularly in starting with open-ended, participant-selected, digital still visual images as part of 31 longitudinal case studies. The paper works to clarify the methodological and epistemological discussions of the visual data, an issue of great interest in qualitative research and visuality for researchers intent on developing understandings of participatory research methods in the field of youth studies.

Short-interval intracortical inhibition is not affected by varying visual feedback in an isometric task in biceps brachiii muscle

Purpose : To establish if visual feedback and force requirements influence SICI.

Methods : SICI was assessed from 10 healthy adults (5 males and 5 females aged between 21 and 35 years) in three submaximal isometric elbow flexion torque levels [5, 20, and 40% of maximal voluntary contraction (MVC)] and with two tasks differing in terms of visual feedback. Single-pulse and paired-pulse motor-evoked potentials (MEPs), supramaximal M-wave, and background surface electromyogram (sEMG) were recorded from the biceps brachii muscle.

Results : Repeated measures MANOVA was used for statistical analyses. Background sEMG did not differ between tasks (F = 0.4, P = 0.68) nor was task × torque level interaction observed (F = 1.2, P = 0.32), whereas background sEMG increased with increasing torque levels (P = 0.001). SICI did not differ between tasks (F = 0.9, P = 0.43) and no task × torque level interaction was observed (F = 2.3, P = 0.08). However, less SICI was observed at 40% MVC compared to the 5 and 20% MVC torque levels (P = 0.01–0.001).

Conclusion : SICI was not altered by performing the same task with differing visual feedback. However, SICI decreased with increasing submaximal torque providing further evidence that SICI is one mechanism of modulating cortical excitability and plays a role in force gradation.

Single-subject research designs and data analyses for assessing elite athletes’ conditioning

Research in conditioning (all the processes of preparation for competition) has used group research designs, where multiple athletes are observed at one or more points in time. However, empirical reports of large inter-individual differences in response to conditioning regimens suggest that applied conditioning research would greatly benefit from single-subject research designs. Single-subject research designs allow us to find out the extent to which a specific conditioning regimen works for a specific athlete, as opposed to the average athlete, who is the focal point of group research designs. The aim of the following review is to outline the strategies and procedures of single-subject research as they pertain to the assessment of conditioning for individual athletes. The four main experimental designs in single-subject research are: the AB design, reversal (withdrawal) designs and their extensions, multiple baseline designs and alternating treatment designs. Visual and statistical analyses commonly used to analyse single-subject data, and advantages and limitations are discussed. Modelling of multivariate single-subject data using techniques such as dynamic factor analysis and structural equation modelling may identify individualised models of conditioning leading to better prediction of performance. Despite problems associated with data analyses in single-subject research (e.g. serial dependency), sports scientists should use single-subject research designs in applied conditioning research to understand how well an intervention (e.g. a training method) works and to predict performance for a particular athlete.

Exploring known risk factors for pressure injury with visual technology

This research has identified that the use of visual technology can support the correlation between peak interface pressure and pressure gradients in the understanding of deep tissue injury. In addition as a pilot study the visual assessment of buttock shape has demonstrated potential for identifying risk of ischial or sacral pressure injury.

Migrant mothers: family photographs and the intra-active fashioning of a visual-material ethics

Migrant mothers play crucial roles within the social landscape of schools, particularly in providing care, education and a transition between home and school for their children. My research considers the relevance of theories of space, place, temporality and mobility in Iranian migrant mothers’ production of subjectivity for themselves and their children in and through their family photograph collections. Gillian Rose’s anthropological approach to visual objects is put to use in an exploration of the co-constitution of migrant women and their photographs. In this paper, I trace the shaping of a visual-material ethics within the research context and appropriate to the sensibilities and needs of the participant women who each moved from Iran to Australia with their children. Karen Barad’s notion of a posthumanist ‘ethics of mattering’ is drawn upon in conceptualising a visual-material ethics as fashioned in the intra-actions of people and visual objects. Specific ethical issues considered include the collaborative process of producing a family photograph, and the shaping and reshaping of images from photograph to line drawing to hybridised photograph-line drawing. A research ethics committee’s application of a liberal individualist, utilitarian and positivist biomedical paradigm in considering the research project is discussed as not only inadequate but also incompatible with the fashioning of a visual-material ethics in concert with the participant women and their photographs.

A systematic scoping investigation of cross-cultural visual communication design

This research project provides a systematic and strcutured investigation into the issues associated with the emergent field of cross-cultural visual communication design. The results of the scoping research and the international cross-cultural design project offer clear guidance for designers through all stages of the communication process. 

The visual/verbal nexus: conflating conventional notions of listening

This paper re-examines the terrain of traditional communication time-based studies in the context of a case study of the communication practices of higher education students in both formal and informal contexts through an online survey and semi-structured phenomenologically focussed interviews. While focussing on the nature of students’ listening behaviour for learning and for leisure, the study explores how ideas and information are mediated in contemporary communication environments which encompass mobile devices, social media, etc. In exploring the nexus between the visual and the verbal, the research probes the ways in which contemporary higher education students navigate the increasingly complex communication environment and questions the capacity of current multiliteracies theories, for example, to engage meaningfully with this less charted terrain. The data suggests that the rapid and pervasive changes due to digital affordances have now positioned listening in a pivotal position alongside the explosive visual communication media. The capacity of our current curricula to respond creatively to the increasingly complex mix of new communication paradigms is open to question.

Towards person authentication by fusing visual and thermal face biometrics

In this chapter we focus on face appearance-based biometrics. The cheap and readily available hardware used to acquire data, their non-invasiveness and the ease of employing them from a distance and without the awareness of the user, are just some of the reasons why these continue to be of great practical interest. However, a number of research challenges remain. Specifically, face biometrics have traditionally focused on images acquired in the visible light spectrum and these are greatly affected by such extrinsic factors such as the illumination, camera angle (or, equivalently, head pose) and occlusion. In practice, the effects of changing pose are usually least problematic and can oftentimes be overcome by acquiring data over a time period, e.g., by tracking a face in a surveillance video. Consequently, image sequence or image set matching has recently gained a lot of attention in the literature [137–139] and is the paradigm adopted in this chapter as well. In other words, we assume that the training image set for each individual contains some variability in pose, but is not obtained in scripted conditions or in controlled illumination. In contrast, illumination is much more difficult to deal with: the illumination setup is in most cases not practical to control and its physics is difficult to accurately model. Thermal spectrum imagery is useful in this regard as it is virtually insensitive to illumination changes, as illustrated in Fig. 6.1. On the other hand, it lacks much of the individual, discriminating facial detail contained in visual images. In this sense, the two modalities can be seen as complementing each other. The key idea behind the system presented in this chapter is that robustness to extreme illumination changes can be achieved by fusing the two. This paradigm will further prove useful when we consider the difficulty of recognition in the presence of occlusion caused by prescription glasses.

On Person Authentication by Fusing Visual and Thermal Face Biometrics

Recognition algorithms that use data obtained by imaging faces in the thermal spectrum are promising in achieving invariance to extreme illumination changes that are often present in practice. In this paper we analyze the performance of a recently proposed face recognition algorithm that combines visual and thermal modalities by decision level fusion. We examine (i) the effects of the proposed data preprocessing in each domain, (ii) the contribution to improved recognition of different types of features, (iii) the importance of prescription glasses detection, in the context of both 1-to-N and 1-to-1 matching (recognition vs. verification performance). Finally, we discuss the significance of our results and, in particular, identify a number of limitations of the current state-of-the-art and propose promising directions for future research.