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Databases play a crucial role in storing and managing vast amounts of data in various organizations and industries. Yet the risk of database leakage poses a significant threat to data privacy and security. To trace the source of database leakage, researchers have proposed many database watermarking schemes. Among them, fake-tuples-based database watermarking shows great potential as it does not modify the original data of the database, ensuring the seamless usability of the watermarked database. However, the existing fake-tuple-based database watermarking schemes need to insert a large number of fake tuples for the embedding of each watermark bit, resulting in low watermark transparency. Therefore, we propose a novel database watermarking scheme based on fake tuples and sparse priority strategy, named SPSW, which achieves the same watermark capacity with a lower number of inserted fake tuples compared to the existing embedding strategy. Specifically, for a database about to be watermarked, we prioritize embedding the sparsest watermark sequence, i.e., the sequence containing the most `0' bits among the currently available watermark sequences. For each bit in the sparse watermark sequence, when it is set to `1', SPSW will embed the corresponding set of fake tuples into the database. Otherwise, no modifications will be made to the database. Through theoretical analysis, the proposed sparse priority strategy not only improves transparency but also enhances the robustness of the watermark. The comparative experimental results with other database watermarking schemes further validate the superior performance of the proposed SPSW, aligning with the theoretical analysis.

Nowadays, two-dimensional (2D) barcodes have been widely used in various domains. And a series of aesthetic 2D barcode schemes have been proposed to improve the visual quality and readability of 2D barcodes for better integration with marketing materials. Yet we believe that the existing aesthetic 2D barcode schemes are partially aesthetic because they only beautify the data area but retain the position detection patterns with the blackwhite appearance of traditional 2D barcode schemes. Thus, in this paper, we propose the first overall aesthetic 2D barcode scheme, called OAcode, in which the position detection pattern is canceled. Its detection process is based on the pre-designed symmetrical data area of OAcode, whose symmetry could be used as the calibration signal to restore the perspective transformation in the barcode scanning process. Moreover, an enhanced demodulation method is proposed to resist the lens distortion common in the camera-shooting process. The experimental results illustrate that when 5$\times$5 cm OAcode is captured with a resolution of 720$\times$1280 pixels, at the screen-camera distance of 10 cm and the angle less or equal to 25{\deg}, OAcode has 100% detection rate and 99.5% demodulation accuracy. For 10$\times$10 cm OAcode, it could be extracted by consumer-grade mobile phones at a distance of 90 cm with around 90% accuracy., Comment: Published in: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

In the past few years, the widespread use of 3D printing technology enables the growth of the market of 3D printed products. On Esty, a website focused on handmade items, hundreds of individual entrepreneurs are selling their 3D printed products. Inspired by the positive effects of machine-readable tags, like barcodes, on daily product marketing, we propose AnisoTag, a novel tagging method to encode data on the 2D surface of 3D printed objects based on reflection anisotropy. AnisoTag has an unobtrusive appearance and much lower extraction computational complexity, contributing to a lightweight low-cost tagging system for individual entrepreneurs. On AnisoTag, data are encoded by the proposed tool as reflective anisotropic microstructures, which would reflect distinct illumination patterns when irradiating by collimated laser. Based on it, we implement a real-time detection prototype with inexpensive hardware to determine the reflected illumination pattern and decode data according to their mapping. We evaluate AnisoTag with various 3D printer brands, filaments, and printing parameters, demonstrating its superior usability, accessibility, and reliability for practical usage., Comment: To be published in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), April 23--28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany

Hongyang Qian,1,* Yiqiu Wang,1,* Zehua Ma,1,* Lei Qian,1 Xiaoguang Shao,1 Di Jin,1 Ming Cao,1 Shupeng Liu,2 Haige Chen,1 Jiahua Pan,1 Wei Xue1 1Department of Urology, Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200127, People’s Republic of China; 2Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Key Laboratory of Specialty Fiber Optics and Optical Access Networks, School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Wei Xue; Jiahua Pan, Department of Urology, Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, No. 1630 Dongfang Road, Shanghai, 200127, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86 21 6838 3375, Email xuewei@renji.com; panjiahua@renji.comObjective: To explore the value of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy analysis of pretreated plasma samples in prediction of bladder cancer (BCa) recurrence after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) and radical cystectomy (RC).Patients and Methods: SERS was used to analyze plasma samples collected before biopsy and treatment in BCa patients undergoing NAC and RC. The value of clinicopathological parameters and distinctive SERS peaks in the prediction of disease recurrence were analyzed in Cox regression proportional hazard analysis and Log rank test. Principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) were employed to process spectral data and construct diagnostic algorithms.Results: A total of 88 patients with 440 plasma SERS spectra were collected. The SRES spectra from recurrent patients were compared with patients who remained recurrence free. The SERS demonstrated higher levels of circulating free nucleic acid components in recurrent population, which is represented by significantly higher intensities at SERS peaks of 725 cm− 1, 1328 cm− 1 and 1455 cm− 1. The SERS also detected signific

Audio watermarking is widely used for leaking source tracing. The robustness of the watermark determines the traceability of the algorithm. With the development of digital technology, audio re-recording (AR) has become an efficient and covert means to steal secrets. AR process could drastically destroy the watermark signal while preserving the original information. This puts forward a new requirement for audio watermarking at this stage, that is, to be robust to AR distortions. Unfortunately, none of the existing algorithms can effectively resist AR attacks due to the complexity of the AR process. To address this limitation, this paper proposes DeAR, a deep-learning-based audio re-recording resistant watermarking. Inspired by DNN-based image watermarking, we pioneer a deep learning framework for audio carriers, based on which the watermark signal can be effectively embedded and extracted. Meanwhile, in order to resist the AR attack, we delicately analyze the distortions that occurred in the AR process and design the corresponding distortion layer to cooperate with the proposed watermarking framework. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm can resist not only common electronic channel distortions but also AR distortions. Under the premise of high-quality embedding (SNR=25.86dB), in the case of a common re-recording distance (20cm), the algorithm can effectively achieve an average bit recovery accuracy of 98.55%., Comment: Accepted by AAAI2023

Hongyang Qian,1,* Yiqiu Wang,1,* Zehua Ma,1,* Lei Qian,1 Xiaoguang Shao,1 Di Jin,1 Ming Cao,1 Shupeng Liu,2 Haige Chen,1 Jiahua Pan,1 Wei Xue1 1Department of Urology, Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200127, People’s Republic of China; 2Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Key Laboratory of Specialty Fiber Optics and Optical Access Networks, School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Wei Xue; Jiahua Pan, Department of Urology, Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, No. 1630 Dongfang Road, Shanghai, 200127, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86 21 6838 3375, Email xuewei@renji.com; panjiahua@renji.comObjective: To explore the value of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy analysis of pretreated plasma samples in prediction of bladder cancer (BCa) recurrence after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) and radical cystectomy (RC).Patients and Methods: SERS was used to analyze plasma samples collected before biopsy and treatment in BCa patients undergoing NAC and RC. The value of clinicopathological parameters and distinctive SERS peaks in the prediction of disease recurrence were analyzed in Cox regression proportional hazard analysis and Log rank test. Principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis (PCA-LDA) were employed to process spectral data and construct diagnostic algorithms.Results: A total of 88 patients with 440 plasma SERS spectra were collected. The SRES spectra from recurrent patients were compared with patients who remained recurrence free. The SERS demonstrated higher levels of circulating free nucleic acid components in recurrent population, which is represented by significantly higher intensities at SERS peaks of 725 cm− 1, 1328 cm− 1 and 1455 cm− 1. The SERS also detected signific

Digital watermarking has been widely studied for the protection of intellectual property. Traditional watermarking schemes often design in a "wider" rule, which applies one general embedding mechanism to all images. But this will limit the scheme into a robustness-invisibility trade-off, where the improvements of robustness can only be achieved by the increase of embedding intensity thus causing the visual quality decay. However, a new scenario comes out at this stage that many businesses wish to give high level protection to specific valuable images, which requires high robustness and high visual quality at the same time. Such scenario makes the watermarking schemes should be designed in a "deeper" way which makes the embedding mechanism customized to specific images. To achieve so, we break the robustness-invisibility trade-off by introducing computation cost in, and propose a novel auto-decoder-like image-specified watermarking framework (ISMark). Based on ISMark, the strong robustness and high visual quality for specific images can be both achieved. In detail, we apply an optimization procedure (OPT) to replace the traditional embedding mechanism. Unlike existing schemes that embed watermarks using a learned encoder, OPT regards the cover image as the optimizable parameters to minimize the extraction error of the decoder, thus the features of each specified image can be effectively exploited to achieve superior performance. Extensive experiments indicate that ISMark outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, which improves the average bit error rate by 4.64% (from 4.86% to 0.22%) and PSNR by 2.20dB (from 32.50dB to 34.70dB)., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

Text content created by humans or language models is often stolen or misused by adversaries. Tracing text provenance can help claim the ownership of text content or identify the malicious users who distribute misleading content like machine-generated fake news. There have been some attempts to achieve this, mainly based on watermarking techniques. Specifically, traditional text watermarking methods embed watermarks by slightly altering text format like line spacing and font, which, however, are fragile to cross-media transmissions like OCR. Considering this, natural language watermarking methods represent watermarks by replacing words in original sentences with synonyms from handcrafted lexical resources (e.g., WordNet), but they do not consider the substitution's impact on the overall sentence's meaning. Recently, a transformer-based network was proposed to embed watermarks by modifying the unobtrusive words (e.g., function words), which also impair the sentence's logical and semantic coherence. Besides, one well-trained network fails on other different types of text content. To address the limitations mentioned above, we propose a natural language watermarking scheme based on context-aware lexical substitution (LS). Specifically, we employ BERT to suggest LS candidates by inferring the semantic relatedness between the candidates and the original sentence. Based on this, a selection strategy in terms of synchronicity and substitutability is further designed to test whether a word is exactly suitable for carrying the watermark signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under both objective and subjective metrics, our watermarking scheme can well preserve the semantic integrity of original sentences and has a better transferability than existing methods. Besides, the proposed LS approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach on the Stanford Word Substitution Benchmark., Comment: Accepted by AAAI-2022

Copyright © 2020 ASME. In a light-water reactor, during normal operating condition, the UO2 nuclear fuel pellets undergo fragmentation primarily due to presence of thermal stresses, fission gas development and pellet-clad mechanical interaction. Under Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA) conditions, a portion of fuel fragments can freely move downwards to the ballooning region due to the significant cladding deformation. The fuel relocation can localize the heat load and in turn accelerate the cladding balloon and burst process. Cladding burst is of great concern because of the potential for fuel dispersal into coolant and clad structural stability. In our work, we built up a finite element model considering cladding balloon, fuel relocation and its resultant thermal feedback during LOCA condition with ABAQUS. The clad balloon model includes phase transformation, swelling, thermal and irradiation creep, irradiation hardening and annealing and other important thermal-mechanical properties. The mass of relocation model was verified against the analytical cases of single balloon and twin balloons. The cladding balloon model combined with fuel thermal conductivity degradation was verified against fuel performance code, FRAPTRAN. Finally, with the evolution of pellet-cladding gap, the fuel mass relocation was calculated and compared against the IFA-650.4 transient test from the Halden reactor.

The intellectual property (IP) of Deep neural networks (DNNs) can be easily ``stolen'' by surrogate model attack. There has been significant progress in solutions to protect the IP of DNN models in classification tasks. However, little attention has been devoted to the protection of DNNs in image processing tasks. By utilizing consistent invisible spatial watermarks, one recent work first considered model watermarking for deep image processing networks and demonstrated its efficacy in many downstream tasks. Nevertheless, it highly depends on the hypothesis that the embedded watermarks in the network outputs are consistent. When the attacker uses some common data augmentation attacks (e.g., rotate, crop, and resize) during surrogate model training, it will totally fail because the underlying watermark consistency is destroyed. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new watermarking methodology, namely ``structure consistency'', based on which a new deep structure-aligned model watermarking algorithm is designed. Specifically, the embedded watermarks are designed to be aligned with physically consistent image structures, such as edges or semantic regions. Experiments demonstrate that our method is much more robust than the baseline method in resisting data augmentation attacks for model IP protection. Besides that, we further test the generalization ability and robustness of our method to a broader range of circumvention attacks.

As an efficient watermark attack method, geometric distortions destroy the synchronization between watermark encoder and decoder. And the local geometric distortion is a famous challenge in the watermark field. Although a lot of geometric distortions resilient watermarking schemes have been proposed, few of them perform well against local geometric distortion like random bending attack (RBA). To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel watermark synchronization process and the corresponding watermarking scheme. In our scheme, the watermark bits are represented by random patterns. The message is encoded to get a watermark unit, and the watermark unit is flipped to generate a symmetrical watermark. Then the symmetrical watermark is embedded into the spatial domain of the host image in an additive way. In watermark extraction, we first get the theoretically mean-square error minimized estimation of the watermark. Then the auto-convolution function is applied to this estimation to detect the symmetry and get a watermark units map. According to this map, the watermark can be accurately synchronized, and then the extraction can be done. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent robustness of the proposed watermarking scheme to local geometric distortions, global geometric distortions, common image processing operations, and some kinds of combined attacks.