Dyslexia is a distinct learning disability that is distinguished by difficulties in decoding and reading fluency, spelling as well as other cognitive skills. This research is conducted to assist learning disability by improving the skills required for children with learning disability in reading and spelling using the assistive technology AVA interactive whiteboard. The approach is by strengthening the micro skills required to improve the fundamental skills such as reading, and spelling thus facilitating the learning process. Tactile and visual modalities are the main focus in the use of the interactive whiteboard. This study aims to develop an interactive whiteboard learning prototype for students with dyslexia. A total of six children from 3 demographics (Chinese, Malay, and Indian) participated in the study. Activities improving the four micro skills were introduced in normal whiteboard and the children were exposed to the prototype AVA interactive whiteboard. Responses using Interactive whiteboard were different when compared to their performance with the normal whiteboard. The analyzed results indicated showed improvements in three of the micro skills using IWB

This systematic review investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cybersecurity by examining the rise of cyberattacks targeting financial institutions. By analyzing over 60 sources including academic research, government reports, and security company data, the review reveals a nearly two-fold increase in cybercrimes targeting financial institutions during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels. Phishing attacks are identified as the most prevalent form of cybercrime within this context. The review delves further by analyzing the differences between phishing and other cyberattacks during COVID-19. Based on the results and observations presented in this paper, the analysis will contribute to enriching strategies to address the growing threat of cybercrime in the financial sector

The network connectivity is often lost during some situations such as in war zones, battle fields or in regard to natural disasters like floods or earthquakes. Therefore, the connection becomes difficult for rescuing teams to locate people. At the same time, mobile nodes are difficult to be tracked/located. Therefore, flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) is the solution which provides a way to tackle this situation without the need for any central infrastructure with the use of flying objects (nodes). FANTEs are frequently formed of tiny unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which are flexible, affordable, and rapid to deploy. UAV as a router and without complex hardware deployment, provides an effective real-time communication solution for multiple UAV systems. FANETs can also be used to provide connectivity in such areas in which flying nodes are utilized. In this paper, we discuss the importance of the FANETs and present a routing protocol comparison that depends on the link budget to identify the optimized packet route for the data to be transmitted. The simulation design results show that a throughput enhancement of 0.62Gbps is achieved in comparison to the distance-based routing protocol. The results also confirm the efficiency of the optimized link state routing (OSLR) protocol over the other. The performance of FANETs can be optimized further by using the OLSR protocol.

Counting the number of people in many estimation systems, such as still images or video frames, is a buoyant research area that is challenging in the field of computer vision. It plays a considerable role in a variety of applications, such as security, management, education, and commerce. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a system to estimate the number of people in digital still images based on the Face Detection method. This system composed of two parts: face detection and counting of detected faces. In the detection step, the Skin Color Face Detection method was applied on the input of a digital still image. In the counting part, the obtained detected faces by the Skin Color Face Detection method have counted to estimate the number of people in an input color image with simple software and simple low-cost hardware. The skin color face detection algorithm was tested using 133 images from the People Image Groups dataset, which contains about 2573 color images of people, to test the proposed system. based on the obtained results, the best precision achieved of the proposed Skin Color face detection algorithm was 85%

Quality assurance and institutional accreditation in education is becoming of paramount importance. This study aims to assess the impacts of the accreditation process of the National Center for Quality Assurance and Accreditation (NCAAA) on the quality of education in one of private university in Libya. Methods: The research adopts a descriptive study design in University of Tripoli Alahlia (UTA) where an official accreditation process was completed by the NCQAA during 2017-2019. Data were collected using the self-study report that produced by the NCQAA accreditation committee during the accreditation process, and were retrieved in specific data collection sheet by one of the authors. Results: The NCQAA accreditation process that lasted about 4 years brought significant changes in the educational progressions and made the staff members more aware of quality issues in education. Our findings also reported significant improvements in the quality of education in the university. Conclusions: The process of NCQAA accreditation conducted in UTA has been positively improved the quality of education. Data from other institutions would also expressively increase the relevance and rationality of the study.

Age prediction is an active study field that can substantially affect many computer vision problems like object recognition. In this paper, an accurate system with extensive experiments is proposed to provide an efficient and accurate approach for age range prediction of people from their facial images. Histogram Equalization technique is used to reduce the illumination effects on all facial images taken from FG-NET and UTD aging databases, and image resizing is used to unify all image sizes. Moreover, Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) are used to extract the features of these images. Then, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) are used for the classification processes. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, both Leave-One-Out (LOO) and Confusion Matrix (CM) are used. The extensive and intensified experiments improved the age range predicting performance up to 98.6%.

Optimistic concurrency control is widely studied in the literature due to the properties of non-blocking and deadlock free execution especially in the domain of real-time systems. In this paper we review the substantial research of optimistic concurrency control protocols. We characterize them into four categories and explore their properties. Then we investigate the general concepts and properties related to Optimistic concurrency control Finally, we demonstrate a comparison table between the varieties of these

protocols.

This paper presents a novel secure and robust steganographic technique in the compressed video domain namely embedding-based byte differencing (EBBD). Unlike most of the current video steganographic techniques which take into account only the intra frames for data embedding, the proposed EBBD technique aims to hide information in both intra and inter frames. The information is embedded into a compressed video by simultaneously manipulating the quantized AC coefficients (AC-QTCs) of luminance components of the frames during MPEG-2 encoding process. Later, during the decoding process, the embedded information can be detected and extracted completely. Furthermore, the EBBD basically deals with two security concepts: data encryption and data concealing. Hence, during the embedding process, secret data is encrypted using the simplified data encryption standard (S-DES) algorithm to provide better security to the implemented system. The security of the method lies in selecting candidate AC-QTCs within each non-overlapping 8 × 8 sub-block using a pseudo random key. Basic performance of this steganographic technique verified through experiments on various existing MPEG-2 encoded videos over a wide range of embedded payload rates. Overall, the experimental results verify the excellent performance of the proposed EBBD with a better trade-off in terms of imperceptibility and payload, as compared with previous techniques while at the same time ensuring minimal bitrate increase and negligible degradation of PSNR values.

Recent developments in both information and communication security have heightened interest in enhancing the embedding capacity for data handling techniques. Although many steganographic techniques, in the literature, have been developed for this purpose, most of them distort the quality of the host-signal during data embedding and the changes will be become visible to the human eye especially for those signals distributed via the Internet which must be processed by a low bit rate compression due to bandwidth limitations. Therefore, the challenge is to create a steganographic technique that is able to hide acceptable amount of data without altering the quality of the host-signal. In this paper, pixel-value differencing (PVD) steganographic scheme and its two modified versions, namely, enhanced pixel-value differencing (EPVD) and tri-way pixel-value differencing (TPVD) were implemented, analyzed and compared in terms of invisibility, fidelity and impact of data hiding on the compression efficiency. Experimental results indicate that the EPVD scheme is capable of providing better performance than other compared schemes.

Abstract Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are the most widely used features in the majority of the speaker and speech recognition applications. Since 1980s, remarkable efforts have been undertaken for the development of these features. Issues such as use suitable spectral estimation methods, design of effective filter banks, and the number of chosen features all play an important role in the performance and robustness of the speech recognition systems. This paper provides an overview of MFCC's enhancement techniques that are applied in speech recognition systems. The details such as accuracy, types of environments, the nature of data, and the number of features are investigated and summarized in the table combined with the corresponding key references. Benefits and drawbacks of these MFCC's enhancement techniques have been discussed. This study will hopefully contribute to raising …

With the rapid development of the Internet and communication networks, the confidentiality of digital

images transmitted over public networks must be preserved by using encryption techniques. Advanced

Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most commonly used encryption algorithms at present. Although

AES has several advantages, such as security in data encryption, it also has a number of drawbacks, such as

high computations, pattern problems when used for encrypting images, and fixed S-box weak points. This

paper proposes a method that overcomes the fixed S-box weak points and improves the performance of

AES when used for encrypting images, particularly when the image data are large. In addition, the

MixColumn stage is replaced by chaotic mapping and XOR operation to reduce the high computations in

MixColumn transform. The proposed method is tested on several images, and the results show that the

proposed method efficiently generated cipher images with very low correlation coefficients of adjacent

pixels and provided better encryption speed and high security as a result of the dependence of the S-box on

the key characteristics of the chaotic system

Steganographic techniques with varying degrees of embedding capacity, perceptual transparency, and security are presented. These techniques have been developed to protect privileged or confidential information restricted to public access and to replace cryptography methods. In this study, three embedding algorithms, namely, least significant bit insertion, bit-plane complexity segmentation, and enhanced version of pixel value difference (EPVD) were implemented and analyzed in terms of the main steganography issues (payload, invisibility, and security) using a different proper performance metrics. This study was motivated by the minimal research focus accorded to hiding data in compression domain for the class of video-based embedding methods. Therefore, analyzing steganographic algorithms is generally based on hiding information in the quantized AC-Coefficients of the frames during the MPEG-2 compression process. Simulation results reveal that EPVD provides better embedded payload and acceptable visual quality, but lower PSNR value.

Most data-hiding techniques have already been investigated in detail as regards image files in both

the spatial and frequency domains. However, they are currently the subject of several investigations in

the video domain. In recent years, among many proposed steganographic methods in the spatial

domain, pixel-value differencing (PVD) provides both high embedding capacity and viable

imperceptibility for images compared with other techniques, such as least significant bit (LSB) method.

It utilizes the remainder of two consecutive pixels in embedding secret data, and the number of

embedded bits is based on the amount of difference. The large amount of difference indicates that more

secret bits can be embedded. However, based on extensive experiments, using such technique to embed

secret data in the frequency domain creates a massive negative effect on hosted data, even resulting in

low embedding capacity, which will lead to undesired distortion in the host file. In this paper, some

modifications to the PVD method are proposed that make it capable of embedding secret information

in macro-blocks of both I-frames and P-frames for MPEG-2 video during compression. The

modifications applied to PVD reduce the distortion drift caused by reversible data hiding within

selected macro-block coefficients. Furthermore, this research devises an adaptive method that can

achieve a more secure scheme for embedding data based on encrypting the host macro-block

coefficients before the hiding process using a secret encrypted key. Based on the simulation results

obtained in this proposed approach, the proposed scheme successfully improves the perceived quality

and achieves much better security compared with PVD-based method while still retaining the

advantage of hiding a large amount of information.

one of the challenges recently occurred in the concept of hiding data is the

robustness of hiding data in the way that is difficult to access or detect. Most of the steganography

schemes are based commonly on embed data within images or video frames on their original form

(uncompressed domain).

This paper presents a new methodology for data hiding in MPEG-2 video standard. Data will be

embedding during the compression stage of the AVI-MPEG2 encoding. The BPCS algorithm has

been modified and used in all our experiments for embed data, and the DES (Data Encryption

Standard) algorithm has been used to encrypt data before hiding. It only embeds encrypted data

bits in the quantized AC coefficients (low-frequency AC coefficients) of Y components (Luminance)

for the I-Frame. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed method has the considerable

advantage over previous steganography schemes with a good PSNR values for the embedded

With the development of the internet and multimedia technology digital video encryption has attracted a great deal of

research interest in the recent few years in applications. In this paper, we propose a method to encrypt video data. The proposed

algorithm is based on the MPEG video coding standard. It selectively encrypts some DCT coefficients in the I frame, B frame and P

frame in MPEG video compression by using chaotic systems. The key in this paper is chaotic sequence based on logistic mapping. It

can produce the pseudo-random sequences with good randomness. The experimental results based on chaotic maps prove the

effectiveness of the proposed method, showing advantages of large key space and high-level security. The proposed algorithm was

measured through a series of tests and achieved good results. The results indicate that the algorithm can be implemented for video

encryption efficiently and it provides considerable levels of security

Steganography is the idea of embedding a secret data in different media and has become an important regulation of methods of data integration. Although the still images are generally applied in the past, is very popular in recent years for the video. The techniques of video data hiding in recent year’s emphasis on the features generated by the video compression standard, a safer method for steganography uses MPEG-4/H.264 Bit Plane Complexity Segmentation (BPCS) algorithm is proposed in this approach. The reason for choosing such a video coverage is the enormous amount of data that can be hidden in each frame of MPEG-4 video. In other words, MPEG-4 has three types of images: I-frame, B, and P frames. Unlike other techniques used to hide data, such as the LSB algorithm, PBCS can achieve better results in both mathematics expression and human vision. In this paper, data is embedded in the videos of the I-frame until the BPCS can reach high levels of integration with low distortion based on the theory that regions of low noise-levels as in a picture can be replaced by noise without a significant loss of image quality. This approach invents data hidden in high-security environments. Experimental results show the success of hidden data in the selected and extracted data from the sequence of frames and also indicate the effectiveness of the implementation plan of steganography compressed video with high security features.

Digital video steganography has attracted a great deal of research interest in the recent few years in applications. In this paper, we propose a method to embed and encrypt messages into video sequences by using steganography technique Based on the H.264 video coding standard. The system implemented in this work provides robust H.264 video compression constant, without significantly affecting the overall bit rate and quality of the video stream. The results indicate that the algorithm can be implemented steganography fast and efficiently and effect vision and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of video sequences are almost unaffected after decoding.

The use of computers for handling image data in the healthcare is growing The amount of data produced by modem image generating techniques, such as Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance (MR), is vast. The amount of data might be a problem from a storage point of view or when the data is sent over a network. To overcome these problems data compression techniques adapted to these applications are needed Many classes of images contain some spatial regions which are more important than other regions. Compression methods which are capable of achieving higher reconstruction quality of important parts of the image have been implemented For medical images, only a small portion of the image might be diagnostically useful but the cost of wrong interpretation is high. Algorithms which deliver lossless compression within the regions of interest (ROJ), and lossy compression elsewhere in the image, might be the key to providing efficient and accurate image coding to the medical community. In this thesis both of compression techniques (lossy and lossless) of medical images using the JPEG algorithm (DCT), will be discussed.