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Production management of perishable goods is highly complex and requires well-informed decisions in corresponding stages. In such production environments, scheduling problems with time constraints are of high relevance to ensure the timely flow of the work-in-process material and goods. This study introduces the no-wait flowshop scheduling problem with release times (NWFSP-RT) to help advance decision support systems in the food production industry. For this purpose, an original mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation is proposed for minimizing makespan. A BS algorithm, and an improved variant, the local search-based Beam Search (BSLS) algorithms are developed to solve the NWFSP-RT problem. Extensive numerical analysis is conducted to analyze the performance of the algorithms in solving this highly intractable extension of the scheduling problems. We showed that BSLS effectively avoids early convergence and local optimality while dismissing non-promising search directions within a partial enumeration solution approach. The statistical analysis confirmed that the improved BS algorithm performs better in terms of solution quality. Applications of the developed heuristic are worthwhile research topics to pursue in solving other complex optimization problems.

The management of roadside parking has been a big issue for metropolitan areas. Many city governments still rely on manual issuing of parking tickets or use parking meters to collect the parking fee. Either way, it is not economical in terms of the expenses on human labor and the efficiency of parking space management. To solve the problem, some researchers have proposed roadside parking systems based on wireless sensor networks. However, the existing approaches focus only on detecting the occupancy of parking spaces. This is not enough for a comprehensive roadside parking system because the identification of vehicles using specific roadside parking spaces is yet unknown. In this work-in-progress research, we propose a roadside parking system based on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon technology to achieve the two goals simultaneously. Specifically, vehicles are attached with a BLE beacon device which broadcasts the identification of the registered vehicle to be scanned by the roadside units. By monitoring the estimated distances between the beacon device and a number of roadside units, our backend system is expected to determine the occupancy of the roadside parking spaces along with the identification of vehicles using the parking spaces.

In recent years, traditional transactions have been replaced by electronic transactions. To protect the security of the electronic transactions, various electronic payment (e-payment) mechanisms have been proposed. However, we find the previous e-payment mechanisms do not provide the non-repudiation requirement in the client side. Thus, a malicious client can easily deny the transaction and the merchant may not get the payment. In addition, these mechanisms have large computation and communication costs so they cannot be applied to the mobile payment for cloud computing. To solve the above problems, we propose a new mobile payment mechanism with anonymity for cloud computing in this paper. The proposed mechanism not only reduces the computation cost but also provides the non-repudiation requirement in the client side. Compared with the related works, the proposed mechanism is securer, fairer, and more efficient. Therefore, the proposed mobile payment mechanism is more suitable and practical for the cloud computing. The client can transact anonymously to protect the payment privacy.The client's bank generates the digital signature as the payment proof.The new payment scheme can eliminate the redundant symmetric keys between the client and the merchant.

QR barcodes are used extensively due to their beneficial properties, including small tag, large data capacity, reliability, and high-speed scanning. However, the private data of the QR barcode lacks adequate security protection. In this article, we design a secret QR sharing approach to protect the private QR data with a secure and reliable distributed system. The proposed approach differs from related QR code schemes in which it uses the QR characteristics to achieve secret sharing and can resist the print-and-scan operation. The secret can be split and conveyed with QR tags in the distribution application, and the system can retrieve the lossless secret when authorized participants cooperate. General browsers can read the original data from the marked QR tag via a barcode reader, and this helps reduce the security risk of the secret. Based on our experiments, the new approach is feasible and provides content readability, cheater detectability, and an adjustable secret payload of the QR barcode.

Recently, Odelu et al. proposed a dynamic group password-based authenticated key agreement scheme for the integrated EPR information system. They claimed that their scheme could ensure user anonymity, perfect forward security and known-key security. After analyzing their scheme, we find that it suffers from some flaws. First, their scheme cannot work. Second, their scheme cannot ensure privacy as claimed. In this paper, we will show how these flaws threaten Odelu et al.'s scheme.

Currently, most commercial pet feeders are stationary machines. Owner can control the feeder to throw food at their pet in a remote mode through a smartphone. Some feeders also have a camera function that allows the owner to observe the pet at home through the camera. However, these machines are stationary and can hardly move. The pictures are also in a fixed shooting angle, yet pets may move around the house. Therefore, this paper will design a remote control system on a toy car that is equipped with an IP camera, feeding stuffs and water. It allows the owner not only to receive the image captured by the remote camera through a mobile device, but also to control its movement through MQTT protocol to achieve the purpose of pet feed and water supplement.

A new VC scheme with cheating-prevention ability is proposed.It reveals solid pattern with moderate-scale on partial-superimposed image.The proposed method verifies shares without any additional authentication shares.The proposed method endows conventional VC with cheating-prevention ability. This paper proposes a simple method for establishing a visual cryptographic (VC) scheme with the ability to prevent cheating. Given the n base-shares generated in a conventional (t,n), 2≤t≤n, VC scheme, an authentication pattern stamping process was designed to encode the n base-shares to get n verifiable shares that exhibit the following properties: (1) knowledge of less than t verifiable-shares gets no secret information, (2) the secret can be revealed by completely superimposing t or more verifiable-shares, and (3) the authentication pattern can be revealed by partially superimposing any pair of verifiable-shares. Theoretical proof and computer simulation for the proposed method are provided. The proposed method has smaller pixel expansion than previous cheating prevention VC schemes, and the verification process is fulfilled without resorting to any additional dedicated verification share. It can be attached easily to any reported VC scheme to endow legitimate users with the capability of detecting faked shares provided by malicious participants.

Verifiability is essential for the secret sharing approach, which allows the involved participants to detect cheaters during the secret retrieval process. In this article, we propose a double verification secret sharing (DVSS) mechanism that can not only prevent fraudulent participants but also satisfy the requirements of secret payload, camouflage, image fidelity and lossless revealed secret. DVSS offers double verification process to enhance the cheater detectability; experimental results reveal that the designed scheme can share larger secret capacity and retain superior image quality than the related secret sharing methods.

Augmented reality (AR) has been widely applied in our lives. An AR tag is usually used and stacked on products for sake of being detected and recognized easily. With the recognized pattern, the AR system thereby can superimpose the corresponding virtual object on the AR tag. The AR tag, however, distort the perception of products. In this study, we proposed a mechanism that integrates the AR tag with digital screen by applying the temporal psycho-visual modulation (TPVM) technique. The new method utilizes the difference between the human-eye perception and the imaging of digital camera to produce an invisible AR tag on the digital screen. The AR tag can be detected by mobile devices but not yet by the human eyes. Based on the concepts of AR and TPVM, the new mechanism is practical in the related AR applications, such as the commercial, entertainment, and protection.

Conceal an imperceptible but recognizable pattern on the media captured with mobile devices.Satisfy the essentials of both visible and invisible watermarking techniques.Promote significant property sharing and identification for mobile applications.Guarantee the PSNR of the marked media versus the original media to be above 50-70dB. This paper describes a new methodology of pattern exhibition for digital media that can conceal an imperceptible but recognizable watermark on the media captured with mobile devices. From the human perception, the imperceptible watermark of marked media can preserve the fidelity and readability of the image's content. With the designed, window-based histogram operation, the embedded pattern of the marked media can be exhibited and recognized visually. That is, the designed mechanism can satisfy the essentials of both visible and invisible watermarking techniques to promote significant pattern sharing and identification for mobile applications. Simulations demonstrate that the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the marked image is superior (around 50-70dB) to many of the existing watermarking algorithms. The process is of low computational complexity, efficient and can be applied in the real world via mobile devices via inner histogram operation.

A real-world scene captured via digital devices, such as a digital still camera, video recorder and mobile device, is a common behavior in recent decades. With the increasing availability, reproduction and sharing of media, the intellectual property of digital media is incapable of guaranty. To claim the ownership of digital camera media, the imperceptible visible watermarking (IVW) mechanism was designed based on the observation that most camera devices contain the postcamera histogram operation. The IVW approach can achieve advantages both the content readability of invisible watermarking methodology and the visual ownership identification of visible watermarking methodology. The computational complexity of IVW is low and can be effectively applied to almost any of the digital electronic devices when capturing the real-world scene without additional instruments. The following results and analysis demonstrate the novel scheme is effective and applicable for versatile images and videos captured.

In order to solve structural optimization problems in the past, it is necessary to integrate structure analysis software and optimization software. Since structural analysis has been the only function considered when developing most of structure analysis software, they suffer from closeness of system. Therefore, it is not easy to integrate them with optimization software. This study proposes an experimental design method to solve this problem including following steps: (1) generate experimental design, (2) implement experimental design, (3) construct a response variable model, (4) define optimization problem, (5) solve optimization problem. The purpose of step (1) through step (3) is to create a response variable model of alternative structure analysis software. This model is a set of regular and simple functions, it can easily define the optimization problem in step (4), in order to facilitate step (5) to solve the optimization problem. The reason to employ neural network instead of traditional regression analysis in step (3) is that the relationship between internal forces and displaced cross section dimension of the structure are often nonlinear. Neural network is a nonlinear system that gives itself the greatest advantage to accurately construct a nonlinear model. This case study is based on optimization design of cable force and tower height in an extradosed bridge, evaluating the feasibility of above method and comparing with published references to confirm the proposed method in this study is applicable to the optimization design of extradosed bridge.

Engineers have proposed many watermark mechanisms for protecting the content of digital media from unauthorized use. The visible watermark scheme indicates the copyright of digital media posted over the Internet by embedding an inconspicuous but recognizable pattern into media. However, the embedding process often results in serious distortion of the protected image. Since the strength of the watermark in conventional methods mainly depends on the feature of protected media, this may lead to unsatisfactory transparency of watermarked images. This paper proposes a removable solution for visible watermark mechanism. By adopting the subsampling technique, the method proposes a contrast-adaptive strategy to solve this problem. This method can also guarantee the essentials of general visible watermark schemes. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms related works in terms of preserving the quality of the restored image.

QR code is the commonly used two-dimensional (2D) barcode recently with the advantages of larger QR content and error correction capability. General QR reader can scan the contents of the QR code. When the content of the QR code is secret information, the information security becomes important. To protect the security of secret information, the new proposed method can embed secret information into the content of QR code. In this new proposed method, the QR content can be easily decoded by a QR reader. Because general browsers can read the QR content, so few people can decoded the QR code can scanning to the secret information. The new method is based on the error correction of the QR code, the QR code reduced distortion, and increases the capacity of hiding secret information. The mechanism based on module so the new method is more efficient. The new way can be applied to mobile phones and mobile devices.

Nowadays, augmented reality (AR) has entered our lives. An AR tag is usually used and stacked on the products for sake of being detected and recognized easily. With the recognized pattern, AR system thereby can superimpose the corresponding virtual object on the AR tag. The AR tag, however, distort the perception of products. In this study, we proposed a method that the AR tag could be embedded on a digital screen by applying the technique of temporal psycho visual modulation (TPVM). The new method utilizes the differences between the human-eye perception and digital camera image-forming to stack an invisible AR tag on digital screen and projector. The AR tag can be detected by digital devices but not yet by human eyes. Based on this concept of AR and TPVM, the related applications would be achieved, such as the immersive virtual scene created in entertainment, commercial and entertainment.

Different from one-dimensional barcode, QR (quick response) code is a popular two-dimensional barcode due to the fact that it can carry greater data capacity and capable of resisting damage. The content of QR code can be easily revealed by barcode scanners. However, in the real world QR applications, the content could be private information, such as the e-ticket and e-coupon. The QR content should be protected to resist from unauthorized users/scanners. In this article, we explore the characteristic of QR barcode and design a QR barcode steganography mechanism. The private information can be embedded into a cover QR tag with high secret payload. For a normal scanner, a browser can only reveal the cover QR content from the marked QR code. Only the authorized user/scanner can further reveal the private secret from the marked QR tag. According to the experimental, the new algorithm can convey satisfactory secret payload in to a QR tag. The mechanism is efficient and feasible for private QR applications.

Fragile watermarking is applied to protect the content integrity of digital images. The main concerns related to watermarking include retaining the quality of the watermarked image and retaining the ability to detect whether any manipulation has occurred. Because recent watermarking techniques seriously distort the quality of the protected image after embedding the authentication code into the image content, attention has been drawn to how to satisfy both the need for image fidelity and detection ability. To account for the influence from both essentials, a novel algorithm is proposed in this article. The new scheme utilizes a weighted-sum function to embed ( n + 1) authentication bits into a block with 2 n pixels by modifying only one original pixel with (±1). With fewer authentication codes, the new process can protect the content of the image. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach can guarantee the fidelity of the watermarked image while retaining tamper-proof functionality.

This paper presents a novel dual watermarking mechanism for digital media that embeds a recognizable pattern into the spatial domain and an invisible logo into the frequency domain. Undoubtedly, visible watermarking is important for protecting online resources from unauthorized reproduction. Due to the visibility of embedded patterns, however, watermarked digital media are vulnerable to the inpainting attack and common signal processing operations. Utilizing hybrid strategies, simulation results show that the novel method can resist these attacks. In particular, the new mechanism allows legal subscribers to restore an unmarked image, whereas other dual watermarking schemes do not. This feature makes it suitable for protecting artistic and valuable media.

Watermarking techniques are applied to digital media to protect their integrity and copyright. The embedding of a watermark, however, often distorts the quality of the protected image. This may be intolerable since the protected media is for preserving artistic and valuable images. Hence, engineers have proposed removable solutions permitting authorized users to restore watermarked images to unmarked images with satisfactory quality. Unfortunately, these mechanisms cannot resist signal processing attacks to protect the ownership. In this article, we propose a novel watermarking mechanism by utilizing pair-difference correlations upon subsampling and the technique of JND. This new approach can guarantee the robust essentials of watermarking schemes. Experimental results reveal that the new method outperforms others in terms of restored image quality. More specifically, this novel approach can resist various attacks to which related works are vulnerable.

The third generation partner project (3GPP) has standardized general packet radio service (GPRS) and the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) to provide cell phone communications and wireless Internet services. Although the data transmission rate is lower than that of wireless local area networks (WLANs), GPRS/UMTS covers larger areas. Hence, to achieve higher speed ubiquitous access, we propose a lightweight secure roaming mechanism (LSRM) that integrates GPRS/UMTS and WLAN. Taking advantage of these two technologies, LSRM offers anonymous roaming and friendly subscriber management. Besides, we give a formal security analysis to LSRM based on BAN authentication logic.

Watermarking is used to protect the integrity and copyright of images. Conventional copyright protection mechanisms; however, are not robust enough or require complex computations to embed the watermark into the host image. In this article, we propose an adaptive copyright protection scheme without the use of discrete cosine transformation (DCT) and discrete wavelet transformation (DWT). This novel approach allows image owners to adjust the strength of watermarks through a threshold, so that the robustness of the watermark can be enhanced. Moreover, our scheme can resist various signal processing operations (such as blurring, JPEG compression, and noising) and geometric transformations (such as cropping, rotation, and scaling). The experimental results show that our scheme outperforms related works in most cases. Specifically, our scheme preserves the data lossless requirement, so it is suitable for medical and artistic images.

Image authentication is applied to protect the integrity of the digital image. Conventional image authentication mechanisms, however, are unfit for the palette-based color images. Palette-based color images such as GIF images are commonly used for media communications. This article proposes a palette-based color image authentication mechanism. This novel scheme can guarantee the essentials of general authentication schemes to protect palette-based color images. Morphological operations are adopted to draw out the tampered area precisely. According to the experimental results, the images embedded with the authentication data still can preserve high image quality; specifically, the new scheme is highly sensitive to altered areas.

The marker-based augmented reality (AR) system can produce 3D virtual object to satisfy the user interaction in the real-world. The marker is a tag/pattern and used to help the AR system to locate the corresponding virtual object on the scene. The marker, however, needs to be designed firstly and the recognition capability is limited. The exhibited virtual object and the marker, unfortunately, are linked in the AR system. Hence, such conventional AR system treats all users as the same role. In this article, we proposed a diversity AR system that can provide the differential virtual objects exhibitions for specific users, such as the joint member and different degree person. The new schemes exploited the error correction capability of QR barcode to conceal the individual secret stream of users into a QR marker. Consequently, the general user can only observe the normal 3D virtual object on the marked QR tag. The assigned members can further reveal the various virtual objects from the same QR tag. The proposed diverse AR system can distinguish different users from same QR marker and thereby exhibit the corresponding virtual objects. The new system is practical and can be widely applied in specific customer AR applications.

The purpose of this paper is to embed information on codes when using search-order coding (SOC) to compress index table. The proposed method reassigned the shorter indicators to the indices that can be transformed to SOC codes and those that can not be transformed are assigned by the other indicators. If the cover image is a smooth image, the proposed method can significantly reduce the size of compression code. Moreover, the size of the compression code is only related to the cover image not to the information in the proposed method. This improves the security of the compression code. According to the experimental results, the proposed method has better performance comparing with the related methods.

This paper presents an active tamper detection and content recovery scheme for digital gray images. It mainly adopts vector quantization compression and treats the index codes as the authentication and recovery data of an image. In order to achieve the purpose of detecting and locating whether an image has been tampered with, this scheme embeds the essential information of authentication and recovery into each pixel value's LSB bit. In addition, this paper also utilizes Chan's LSB matching function to improve the quality of embedded image. Experimental results showed that the authentication data of index codes are able to detect those possible modified regions effectively and clearly. Moreover, the embedded image quality also improves nearly to 1.66dB.

Parallel association rules mining is a noticeable problem in data mining. However, little work has been proposed to deal with three important issues: (1) less memory usage; (2) less communication, among the involved computers, over the network; and (3) load balance among computers. In this paper, we present a graph-based scheme to solve the parallel mining problem by applying independent groups (clusters of maximal cliques). To bring the three issues to a close, the purpose of the independent groups aims at dividing a database into several independent sub-databases, so each sub-database can be employed independently to perform mining algorithms. To emphasis the effectiveness of the graph-based scheme, we adopt the independent groups not only for maximal large itemsets mining but also for general large itemsets mining. The experimental results show that our scheme can improve the efficiency for parallel mining when the independent groups are well-organized and designed.

In cloud computing environments, the user authentication scheme is an important security tool because it provides the authentication, authorization, and accounting for cloud users. Therefore, many user authentication schemes for cloud computing have been proposed in recent years. However, we find that most of the previous authentication schemes have some security problems. Besides, it cannot be implemented in cloud computing. To solve the above problems, we propose a new ID-based user authentication scheme for cloud computing in this paper. Compared with the related works, the proposed scheme has higher security levels and lower computation costs. In addition, it can be easily applied to cloud computing environments. Therefore, the proposed scheme is more efficient and practical than the related works.

QR code is the commonly used two-dimensional (2D) barcode recently with the advantages of larger QR content and error correction capability. Based on the error correction property of QR code, we designed a secret hiding technique for QR barcode. The proposed scheme can conceal the secret data into the cover QR code without distorting the readability of QR content. That is, general browsers can read the QR content from the marked QR code for the sake of reducing attention. Only the authorized receiver can encrypt and retrieve the secret from the marked QR code. The secret payload of the designed scheme is adjustable. The scheme can convey larger secret into a QR code according to the selection of the QR version and the error correction level. The simulations demonstrate that the designed scheme is efficient and low computational complexity. The mechanism can be applied to the QR reader and mobile phone.

Cheater detection is essential for a secret sharing approach which allows the involved participants to detect cheaters during the secret retrieval process. In this article, we propose a verifiable secret sharing mechanism that can not only resist dishonest participants but can also satisfy the requirements of larger secret payload and camouflage. The new approach conceals the shadows into a pixel pair of the cover image based on the adaptive pixel pair matching. Consequently, the embedding alteration can be reduced to preserve the fidelity of the shadow image. The experimental results exhibit that the proposed scheme can share a large secret capacity and retain superior quality.

Visible watermarking mechanism often used to claim the copyright of the protected media from the human visual perception. As a result of the visible logo superposes the media content, the visible logo inevitable distorts the content and degrades the readability of digital media. To diminish the visual distortion but preserve the advantages of visible watermarking technique, in this paper, we proposed an imperceptible visible watermarking approach. The new approach disguises the visible watermark into the protected image with the color distribution interval. From the visual perception of the concealed watermarked image, the appearance is similar to the original image. This can avoid degrading the image content and can satisfy the readability requirement. Furthermore, the receiver can recognize the visible watermark while adjusting the color distribution interval of the watermarked image without the traditional watermark extracting procedure. That is, the proposed imperceptible visible watermarking approach can achieve the advantages of both visible watermarking and invisible watermarking techniques to protect the digital image.

Verifiability is essential for a secret sharing approach which allows the involved participants to detect cheaters during the secret retrieval process. In this article, we propose a verifiable secret image sharing scheme that can not only resist dishonest participants but can also satisfy the requirements of loss less and camouflage. The new approach conceals the shadows into a pixel pair of the host image by adding or subtracting a pixel value by 1. Consequently, the embedding alteration can be reduced to preserve the fidelity of the shadow image. Recoverability is a practical essential for protecting the valuable host image from being distorted. After the authorized participants retrieve a loss less secret image, they can remove the shadows from the shadow images to recover the unmarked host image. The experimental results exhibit that the proposed scheme can share a large secret capacity according to the threshold t and retain superior quality of around 52 dB.

For digital communication, distributed storage and management of media content over system holders is a critical issue. In this article, an efficient verifiable sharing scheme is proposed that can satisfy the significant essentials of distribution sharing and can achieve the lossless property of the host media. Verifiability allows holders to detect and identify the counterfeited shadows during cooperation in order to prevent cheaters. Only authorized holders can reveal the lossless shared content and then reconstruct the original host image. The shared media capacity is adjustable and proportional to the increase of t. The more distributed holders, the larger the shared media capacity. Moreover, the ability to reconstruct the image preserves the fidelity of valuable host media, such as military and medical images. According to the results, the proposed approach can achieve superior performance to that of related sharing schemes in order to effectively provide distributed media management and storage.

The significant essential of secret image sharing approaches is that the revealed content of the secret image must be lossless. Moreover, the distorted stego images can be reverted to the original cover image. In order to achieve these purposes, we first transform the secret pixels into the m-ary notational system. Then, the information data used to reconstruct original pixels from camouflaged pixels are calculated. The information data and transformed secret data are shared using the (t, n)-threshold sharing scheme. In this way, we can retrieve the lossless secret image and reverse the stego image to the original image. According to the experiments, the shadows can be successfully camouflaged in the cover image, and the stego images have satisfactory quality. Moreover, our scheme allows for a large capacity of embedded secret data.

Fragile watermarking is applied to protect the integrity of the digital media. Current fragile watermarking schemes mainly provide the functionality of detecting and locating the tampered regions of an authorized image. The capability to recover the tampered regions has rarely been discussed in the literature. In fact, the recovery ability is an important issue while proving and maintaining the image integrity. For achieving these purposes, we first utilize the concept of self-reference to preserve the significant information of a protected image. Then we embed the information into the protected image using the technique of wet paper coding. According to experimental results, the new scheme is highly sensitive to detect and locate the tampered area. In particular, the results show that the quality of recovery image is satisfactory.

In this paper, we shall propose two spatial-domain image hiding schemes with the concept of secret sharing. The two new schemes use the two-out-of-two visual secret sharing technique to generate two shares for hiding a secret two-tone image. These two secret shares are embedded into two gray-level cover images by the proposed embedding scheme. To decode the hidden messages, we can superimpose the extracted shares from the secret-share-carrier images (namely the embedding images). The advantages of our scheme are simple computation and good security, and thus it is very suitable for applications involving low power verification systems. Besides, our scheme can support two participants to share one secret two-tone image. According to our experimental results, the two proposed schemes are capable of offering satisfactory embedding image quality

A secret sharing system based upon two-dimensional QR barcode is proposed in this article. The proposed approach generates shadows in a specific way and utilizes the characteristics of QR code to embed shadows into cover QR codes. Each cover QR code itself is a valid QR code which can be scanned and decoded by a general QR code reader. According to the experiments, the proposed approach can satisfy the content readability of the QR code and can be distributed via public channels without raising suspicion.

Quick response (QR) code has become one of the more popular two-dimensional barcodes because of its greater data capacity and higher damage resistance. The barcode scanners can easily extract the information hidden in the QR code while scanning the data modules. However, some sensitive data directly stored in QR codes are insecure in real-world QR applications, such as the e-ticket and e-coupon. To protect the sensitive data, this paper explores the characteristics of QR barcodes to design a secret hiding mechanism for the QR barcode with a higher payload compared to the past ones. For a normal scanner, a browser can only reveal the formal information from the marked QR code. The authorized user/scanner can further reveal the sensitive data from the marked QR tag. The experiments demonstrate a satisfactory secret payload and the feasibility of the proposed scheme.