During recent years, emerging multimedia processing techniques with information security services have received a lot of attention. Among those trends are steganography and steganalysis. Steganography techniques aim to hide the existence of secret messages in an innocent-looking medium, where the medium before and after embedding looks symmetric. Steganalysis techniques aim to breach steganography techniques and detect the presence of invisible messages. In the modern world, digital multimedia such as audio, images, and video became popular and widespread, which makes them perfect candidates for steganography. Monitoring this huge multimedia while the user communicates with the outside world is very important for detecting whether there is a hidden message in any suspicious communication. However, steganalysis has a significant role in many fields, such as to extract the stego-message, to detect suspicious hidden messages and to evaluate the robustness of existing steganography techniques. This survey provides the general principles of hiding secret messages using digital multimedia as well as reviewing the background of steganalysis. In this survey, the steganalysis is classified based on many points of view for better understanding. In addition, it provides a deep review and summarizes recent steganalysis approaches and techniques for audio, images, and video. Finally, the existing shortcomings and future recommendations in this field are discussed to present a useful resource for future research.

With the unprecedented growing demand for communication between Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the upcoming 5G and 6G technologies will pave the path to a widespread use of ultra-reliable low-latency applications in such networks. However, with most of the sensitive data being transmitted over wireless links, security, privacy and trust management are emerging as big challenges to handle. IoT applications vary, from self-driving vehicles, drone deliveries, online shopping, IoT smart cities, e-healthcare and robotic assisted surgery, with many applications focused on Voice over IP (VoIP) and require securing data from potential eavesdroppers and attackers. One well-known technique is a hidden exchange of secret data between the devices for which security can be achieved with audio steganography. Audio steganography is an efficient, reliable and low-latency mechanism used for securely communicating sensitive data over wireless links. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3’s (MP3’s) bit rate falls within the acceptable sound quality required for audio. Its low level of noise distortion does not affect its sound quality, which makes it a good carrier medium for steganography and watermarking. The strength of any embedding technique lies with its undetectability measure. Although there are many detection techniques available for both steganography and watermarking, the detection accuracy of secret data has been proven erroneous. It has yet to be confirmed whether different bit rates or a constant sampling rate for embedding eases detection. The accuracy of detecting hidden information in MP3 files drops with the influence of the compression rate or increases. This drop or increase is caused by either the increase in file track size, the sampling rate or the bit rate. This paper presents an experimental study that evaluates the detection accuracy of the secret data embedded in MP3. Training data were used for the embedding and detection of text messages in MP3 files. Several iterations were evaluated. The experimental results show that the used approach was effective in detecting the embedded data in MP3 files. An accuracy rate of 97.92% was recorded when detecting secret data in MP3 files under 128-kbps compression. This result outperformed the previous research work.

The signals acquired in brain-computer interface (BCI) experiments usually involve several complicated sampling, artifact and noise conditions. This mandated the use of several strategies as preprocessing to allow the extraction of meaningful components of the measured signals to be passed along to further processing steps. In spite of the success present preprocessing methods have to improve the reliability of BCI, there is still room for further improvement to boost the performance even more. A new preprocessing method for denoising P300-based brain-computer interface data that allows better performance with lower number of channels and blocks is presented. The new denoising technique is based on a modified version of the spectral subtraction denoising and works on each temporal signal channel independently thus offering seamless integration with existing preprocessing and allowing low channel counts to be used. The new method is verified using experimental data and compared to the classification results of the same data without denoising and with denoising using present wavelet shrinkage based technique. Enhanced performance in different experiments as quantitatively assessed using classification block accuracy as well as bit rate estimates was confirmed. The new preprocessing method based on spectral subtraction denoising offer superior performance to existing methods and has potential for practical utility as a new standard preprocessing block in BCI signal processing.

The term “mobile learning” (or “m-learning”) refers to using handheld phones to learn and wireless computing as a learning tool and connectivity technology. This paper presents and explores the latest mobile platform for teaching and studying programming basics. The M-Learning tool was created using a platform-independent approach to target the largest available number of learners while reducing development and maintenance time and effort. Since the code is completely shared across mobile devices (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), students can use any smartphone to access the app. To make the programme responsive, scalable, and dynamic, and to provide students with personalised guidance, the core application is based on an analysis design development implementation and assessment (ADDIE) model implemented in the Xamarin framework. The application’s key features are depicted in a prototype. An experiment is carried out on BS students at a university to evaluate the efficacy of the generated application. A usefulness questionnaire is administered to an experimental community in order to determine students’ expectations of the developed mobile application’s usability. The findings of the experiment show that the application is considerably more successful than conventional learning in developing students’ online knowledge assessment abilities, with an impact size of 1.96. The findings add to the existing mobile learning literature by defining usability assessment features and offering a basis for designing platform-independent m-learning applications. The current findings are explored in terms of their implications for study and teaching practice.

In a broad sense, the Computing With Words (CWW) vision tries to tackle the problem of human intelligence by taking the human mind as a role model. A key element to facilitate the mapping of the human's brain reasoning into computer processes is to identify the step-by-step formation of perceptual judgments. In this paper, we present an approach that employs general type-2 fuzzy logic which enables the human perceptions to be dynamically modeled and adapted depending on the human experience. This approach can be regarded as a step to enable the CWW vision. We will present real-world experiments which were conducted with real users in the intelligent apartment (iSpace) in the University of Essex. The experiments demonstrate the results of the proposed approach for the adaptive modeling of ambient luminance perception.

Widespread development of system software, the process of learning, and the excellence in profession of teaching are the formidable challenges faced by the learning behavior prediction system. The learning styles of teachers have different kinds of content designs to enhance their learning. In this learning environment, teachers can work together with the students, but the learning materials are designed by the teachers. The cognitive style deals with mental activities such as learning, remembering, thinking, and the usage of language. Therefore, being motivated by the problems mentioned above, this paper proposes the concept of adaptive optimization-based neural network (AONN). The learning behavior and browsing behavior features are extracted and incorporated into the input of artificial neural network (ANN). Hence, in this paper, the neural network weights are optimized with the use of grey wolf optimizer (GWO) algorithm. The output operation of e-learning with teaching equipment is chosen based on the cognitive style predicted by AONN. In experimental section, the measures of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, time (sec), and memory (bytes) are carried out. Each of the measure is compared with the proposed AONN and existing fuzzy logic methodologies. Ultimately, the proposed AONN method produces higher accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity results. The results demonstrate that the algorithm proposed in this study can automatically learn network structures competitively, unlike those achieved for neural networks through standard approaches.