ABSTRACTS OF RESEARCH PROJECT AREAS OFFERED IN THE 2008 SUMMER RESEARCH PROGRAM
(1) Document Image Watermarking and Security - Prof. E. Wong
With the proliferation of digital media such as digital images, digital audio, and digital video, robust digital watermarking and data hiding techniques are needed for copyright protection, copy control, annotation, and authentication. While many techniques have been proposed for digital color and grayscale images, not all of them can be directly applied to binary text images. The difficulty lies in the fact that changing pixel values in a binary document could introduce irregularities that are very visually noticeable. Hence, a different class of embedding techniques must be developed. Such techniques would have wide applications, as documents remain as the primary form of written communication in our society, and they are exchanged and circulated in large volume, much more so than photographic images. Potential applications include copy control and prevention, ownership assertion, authentication, fingerprinting or traitor tracing, steganography, media bridging, and smart documents, to name a few. The variety of documents include bank checks, financial instruments, legal documents, driver licenses, birth certificates, digital books, engineering maps, architectural drawings, road maps, etc. In this project, we will develop techniques and algorithms for document image watermarking and security. Proficiency in C++ programming is required.
(2) Audio and Video Processing for Multimedia Applications - Prof Y. Wang
Along with significant increases in the capacity and speed of the Internet and various storage media, various applications are becoming a reality, including from playing CD/DVD movies, to Web browsing/retrieval of multimedia content, to conferencing/collaborative work among participants in multiple remote sites with full-blown audio-visual support. There are still many challenging problems to be solved to improve the quality of such applications/services. Possible research projects include: i) more advanced video compression schemes that not only provides significant compression gains but also are resilient to network congestion/failures and can adapt the compressed data rate according to available network resources; ii) automatic detection and tracking of special objects, e.g., human faces/bodies, cars, buildings, to enable semantically meaningful indexing and retrieval of video, and to facilitate detection of “suspicious events” in surveillance video, iii) automatic segmentation and classification of video into semantically connected units, to facilitate audio/video editing and indexing; and iv) interaction with networking protocols to guarantee the desired quality of services. Specific project topic may change from year to year, depending on student interests/experience.
(3) Network Forensics – Prof. N. Memon
Networks are everywhere and are an integral part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Threats to essential networks have become one of the most important challenges facing several government and private entities. Recent attacks on our critical network infrastructure have shown that we are unable to prevent the attacks and, in most cases, unable to identify the perpetrators. In mitigating threats, identifying attackers, and responding to attacks are crucial capabilities that must be developed for the security and survival of our networks. Our group, ISIS, in the Computer Science Department at Polytechnic has designed a network-wide ubiquitous logging mechanism, called Fornet, that answers remote queries about past and present network events. The project is ambitious in scope and we have a need for students with a wide variety of skills and interests including detection/classification, packet-level programming, compression, high-performance computing, and distributed computing. The project involves a mixture of algorithm development and system programming. Knowledge of networking and advanced programming is needed.
(4) Digital Image Forensics – Prof. Memon
Powerful digital image editing tools make it very easy for almost anyone to produce good quality forgeries. Combined with the progress made in computer vision and computer graphics, proving the authenticity and integrity of digital images is a challenging research problem with increasing social and legal impact on everyday life. Digital image forensics is an emerging research field with a focus on a wide spectrum of problems. These include identifying how an image is generated (e.g., digital camera, scanner, synthetic), determining the class properties of its source, matching an image to a potential source device and detecting tampering. Image forensics techniques, in this context, are concerned with uncovering some underlying fact about an image. Our group at ISIS was among the first to initiate research in this direction and devised many novel techniques. Now we are developing a forensics toolbox that incorporates many new techniques with the existing ones. The technology is in demand and will be made available to forensics experts and law enforcement agencies to be used in real-life situations. The project involves both research and development activities, and we need students to help us in both respects. The qualifications for the students include basic knowledge of signal/image processing, experience in programming for both implementing our techniques and building GUIs.
(5) VDHL Model for a High Speed Encryption Algorithm - Prof. R. Karri
This project entails writing a VDHL model for a 128-bit private key encryption algorithm, simulating it using a VDHL testbench and possibly synthesizing it. Through this project, students can learn VDHL (a hardware description language) based modeling, simulation and field programmable gate array implementation of a design using industrial strength VLSI design tools.
(6) High-Speed Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (NIDPS) - Prof. Chao
In today's Internet, intrusions to computers through the network are commonplace. Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (NIDPSs) are vital in the fight against these intrusions. NIDPSs search for certain malicious content in network traffic (i.e., signatures) which hints about an on-going intrusion. There are a large variety of signatures corresponding to the large variety of intrusions. Detecting these signatures in the huge volume of network traffic in real-time while the intrusion is in progress is a challenge. The challenge is due to the fact that for a 40 Gbps link, a byte of traffic arrives at every 200 ps, a very short time period to run the complicated analysis needed to detect intrusions. In this project, the student will be working on designing high-speed specialized hardware to take on this challenge with Prof. Chao and his graduate students. The project requires the student to be good at C, C++ or VHDL languages. The student will have a chance to experience high-speed hardware design, optimization and test with a focus on network security.
(7) Cooperative Wireless Networking – Prof. S. Panwar and T. Korakis
By introducing additional collaboration from the nodes that otherwise will not directly participate in the transmission, cooperative communication unveils a revolutionary design paradigm for wireless communication, which enables tremendous performance improvement. The concept of cooperation has been exemplified in a novel wireless protocol called the medium access control (CoopMAC) protocol. Extensive evaluations have demonstrated that a WiFi network requiring CoopMAC can load to a 50% increase in the capacity. This internship project primarily focuses on investigating the impact of cooperation on upper protocol layers (e.g., networking layer) by using simulation or implementation approach. The simulation will be performed on OPNET, an advanced simulation platform widely used in networking industry. The implementation will be based on an open source Linux driver for WiFi card. The participant will have an opportunity to learn protocol design and optimization techniques, obtain simulation/implementation development skills, and position himself/herself on a par with the latest trends in wireless networking. The prerequisite for the participant includes reasonable familiarity with C coding and basic knowledge of wireless networking.
(8) Software Defined Radio for Cooperative Communications - Professors E. Erkip and M. Knox
Wireless technology has advanced rapidly over the last decade and now continues to expand on a global scale. This internship involves developing physical layer algorithms in a Software Defined Radio (SDR) as part of a cooperative communication system currently being developed at Polytechnic Institute of NYU. This wireless system is based on the GNU radio platform -http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/. The GNU radio operates on baseband signals that are sampled and processed on a personal computer. The GNU radio uses radio hardware from ETTUS research - http://www.ettus.com/, for RF to baseband signal conversion. The GNU software platform is open source operating under the Linux OS and using C++ signal processing libraries. The student is required to have a basic understanding of wireless communications, some experience in Matlab and/or Simulink and a reasonable familiarity with C++ coding. Python programming is a plus.
(9) Optimization in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks – Prof. Z-P Jiang
Wireless techniques are now widely used in the world and areas of new applications are quickly expanding for the great improvement of our daily life. Generally speaking, wireless networks are classified into infrastructured networks and infrastructureless (ad hoc) networks. An example of the first category is cellular-phone networks where a phone connects to the base-station with the best signal quality. In the case of ad hoc networks, every user serves as a router to relay information from other users. Ad-hoc networks prove to be useful in situations where no fixed base stations are available. To select a good path to relay the information, routing schemes are essentially important for ad hoc technology. Students are expected to be involved in both simulation study and research-oriented projects. They will have an opportunity to learn how mathematical modeling and optimization techniques are applied in wireless ad-hoc networks. Students will also gain access to the network simulator (ns-2) and Matlab software for computer simulation.
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