Web Image Re-Ranking Using Query-Specific Semantic Signatures

Abstract—Image re-ranking, as an effective way to improve the results of

web-based image search, has been adopted by current commercial search
engines such as Bing and Google. Given a query keyword, a pool of
images are first retrieved based on textual information. By asking the user
to select a query image from the pool, the remaining images are re-ranked
based on their visual similarities with the query image. A major challenge
is that the similarities of visual features do not well correlate with images’
semantic meanings which interpret users’ search intention. Recently
people proposed to match images in a semantic space which used
attributes or reference classes closely related to the semantic meanings of
images as basis. However, learning a universal visual semantic space to
characterize highly diverse images from the web is difficult and
inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel image re-ranking
framework, which automatically offline learns different semantic spaces
for different query keywords. The visual features of images are projected
into their related semantic spaces to get semantic signatures. At the online
stage, images are re-ranked by comparing their semantic signatures
obtained from the semantic space specified by the query keyword. The
proposed query-specific semantic signatures significantly improve both
the accuracy and efficiency of image re-ranking. The original visual
features of thousands of dimensions can be projected to the semantic
signatures as short as 25 dimensions. Experimental results show that 25-
40 percent relative improvement has been achieved on re-ranking
precisions compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Multimedia Traffic Avoidance Using Opportunistic Routing Protocol

Abstract—The increase in multimedia services has put energy saving on

the top of current demands for mobile devices. Unfortunately, batteries’
lifetime has not been as extended as it would be desirable. For that
reason, reducing energy consumption in every task performed by these
devices is crucial. In this work, a novel opportunistic routing protocol,
called JOKER, is introduced. This proposal presents novelties in both the
candidate selection and coordination phases, which permit increasing the
performance of the network supporting multimedia traffic as well as
enhancing the nodes’ energy efficiency. JOKER is compared in
different-nature test-benches with BATMAN routing protocol, showing
its superiority in supporting a demanding service such as video-streaming
in terms of QoE, while achieving a power draining reduction in routing
tasks.
 Cooperative Jamming Aided Secrecy Enhancement in Wireless
Networks With Passive Eavesdroppers

Abstract—This paper investigates cooperative security in wireless

networks, where a source (Alice) intends to transmit a confidential
message to a legitimate destination (Bob), with the help of a cooperative
jammer (Charlie), coexisting with multiple passive eavesdroppers (Eves).
In particular, by assuming knowledge of Bob’s perfect channel state
information (CSI) but only Eves’ statistical CSIs, secrecy beamforming
with artificial noise (AN) is utilized for secure transmission, and
cooperative jamming (CJ) is explored to further enhance secrecy. We first
derive an accurate closed form expression for the secrecy outage
probability (SOP), and establish the condition under which positive
secrecy rate is achievable. Then we provide a secure transmit design for
maximizing the SOP constrained secrecy rate. Moreover, based on a strict
mathematical analysis, we characterize the impact of the main channel
quality and the number of Eves on transmit design and secrecy
performance. Specifically, optimal power allocation ratio between the
information-bearing signal and the AN signal increases as the main
channel quality improves, and decreases with the number of Eves.
Numerical results confirm that our design achieves performance
improvement in terms of both secrecy rate and secure energy efficiency
(EE), as compared to the approach without CJ.
 Auditing Big Data Storage in Cloud Computing Using Divide and
Conquer Tables

Abstract—Cloud computing has arisen as the mainstream platform of utility

computing paradigm that offers reliable and robust infrastructure for storing
data remotely, and provides on demand applications and services. Currently,
establishments that produce huge volume of sensitive data, leverage data
outsourcing to reduce the burden of local data storage and maintenance. The
outsourced data, however, in the cloud are not always trustworthy because of
the inadequacy of physical control over the data for data owners. To etter
streamline this issue, scientists have now focused on relieving the security
threats by designing remote data checking (RDC) techniques. However, the
majority of these techniques are inapplicable to big data storage due to
incurring huge computation cost on the user and cloud sides. Such schemes in
existence suffer from data dynamicity problem from two sides. First, they are
only applicable for static archive data and are not subject to audit the dynamic
outsourced data. Second, although, some of the existence methods are able to
support dynamic data update, increasing the number of update operations
impose high computation and communication cost on the auditor due to
maintenance of data structure, i.e., merkle hash tree. This paper presents an
efficient RDC method on the basis of algebraic properties of the outsourced
files in cloud computing, which inflicts the least computation and
communication cost. The main contribution of this paper is to present a new
data structure, called Divide and Conquer Table (D&CT), which proficiently
supports dynamic data for normal file sizes. Moreover, this data structure
empowers our method to be applicable for large-scale data storage with
minimum computation cost. The one-way analysis of variance shows that there
are significant differences between the proposed method and the existing
methods in terms of the computation and communication cost on the auditor
and cloud.