It is of great importance in telemedicine to protect authenticity and integrity of medical images. They are mainly addressed by two technologies, which are region of interest (ROI) lossless watermarking and reversible watermarking. However, the former causes biases on diagnosis by distorting region of none interest (RONI) and introduces security risks by segmenting image spatially for watermark embedding. The latter fails to provide reliable recovery function for the tampered areas when protecting image integrity. To address these issues, a novel robust reversible watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper. In our scheme, a reversible watermarking method is designed based on recursive dither modulation (RDM) to avoid biases on diagnosis. In addition, RDM is combined with Slantlet transform and singular value decomposition to provide a reliable solution for protecting image authenticity. Moreover, ROI and RONI are divided for watermark generation to design an effective recovery function under limited embedding capacity. Finally, watermarks are embedded into whole medical images to avoid the risks caused by segmenting image spatially. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed lossless scheme not only has remarkable imperceptibility and sufficient robustness, but also provides reliable authentication, tamper detection, localization and recovery functions, which outperforms existing schemes for protecting medical images.
12 August 2019 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Glaucoma is chronic eye disease that leads to irreversible vision loss. The Cup-to-Disc Ratio (CDR) serves as the most important indicator for glaucoma screening and plays an significant role in clinical screening and early diagnosis of glaucoma. In general, obtaining CDR is subjected to measuring on manually or automatically segmented optic disc and cup. Despite great efforts have been devoted, obtaining CDR values automatically with high accuracy and robustness is still a great challenge due to the heavy overlap between optic cup and neuroretinal rim regions. In this paper, a direct CDR estimation method is proposed based on the well-designed semi-supervised learning scheme, in which CDR estimation is formulated as a general regression problem while optic disc/cup segmentation is cancelled. The method directly regresses CDR value based on the feature representation of optic nerve head via deep learning technique while bypassing intermediate segmentation. The scheme is a two-stage cascaded approach comprised of two phases: unsupervised feature representation of fundus image witha convolutional neural networks (MFPPNet) and CDR value regression by random forest regressor. The proposed scheme is validated on the challenging glaucoma dataset Direct-CSU and public ORIGA, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve a lower average CDR error of 0.0563 and a higher correlation of around 0.726 with measurement before manual segmentation of optic disc/cup by human experts. Our estimated CDR values are also tested for glaucoma screening, which achieves the areas under curve of 0.905 on dataset of 421 fundus images. The experiments show that the proposed method is capable of state-of-the-art CDR estimation and satisfactory glaucoma screening with calculated CDR value.
19 December 2023 in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
Federated learning (FL) allows multiple participants to collaboratively build deep learning (DL) models without directly sharing data. Consequently, the issue of copyright protection in FL becomes important since unreliable participants may gain access to the jointly trained model. Application of homomorphic encryption (HE) in a secure FL framework prevents the central server from accessing plaintext models. Thus, it is no longer feasible to embed the watermark at the central server using existing watermarking schemes. In this article, we propose a novel client-side FL watermarking scheme to tackle the copyright protection issue in secure FL with HE. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first scheme to embed the watermark to models under a secure FL environment. We design a black-box watermarking scheme based on client-side backdooring to embed a pre-designed trigger set into an FL model by a gradient-enhanced embedding method. Additionally, we propose a trigger set construction mechanism to ensure that the watermark cannot be forged. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme delivers outstanding protection performance and robustness against various watermark removal attacks and ambiguity attack.
1 May 2020 in Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry
A dual-frequency continuous-wave (DF-CW) radar is a cost-effective device for multiple target tracking in indoor environments. To position the target, the traditional DF-CW radar adopts a quasi-monostatic structure to acquire the target range and direction of arrival (DOA). However, the traditional DF-CW radar usually suffers from the drawbacks of low positioning accuracy, biased target information, and severe ambiguous frequency interference. To overcome these drawbacks, the traditional DF-CW radar structure is modified, and an improved target tracking algorithm, which is based only on the range measurements, is proposed in this paper. Compared with the traditional DF-CW radar-based detection, the proposed algorithm not only can achieve higher positioning accuracy, reveal more abundant and precise target information, but also can help to suppress the ambiguous frequency interference, which is of great importance in the multiple target tracking scenarios. Besides, the proposed DF-CW radar can also effectively reduce the coupling interference, thus contributing to the improvement of the radar dynamic range. A series of experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and the obtained results illustrate a better performance of the proposed algorithm compared with the traditional algorithms.