The masking countermeasure is an efficient method to protect cryptographic algorithms against Differential Power Analysis (DPA) and similar attacks. For symmetric cryptosystems, two techniques are commonly used: Boolean masking and arithmetic masking. Conversion methods have been proposed for switching from Boolean masking to arithmetic masking, and conversely. The way conversion is applied dep...

Octave masking was investigated at four different frequencies (250, 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz) as a function of intensity of the masker and phase of the test signal. Slopes of phase-locked octave masking were found to increase with masking signal frequency, from 0.80 dB/dB at 250 Hz to 3.0 dB/dB at 2000 Hz. The monaural octave-masking phase effect was considerably larger for masking signals at low...

There are many classes of masking, but two major classes are easily defined: neural masking and dynamic masking. Neural masking characterizes the internal noise associated with the neural representation of the auditory signal, a form of loudness noise. Dynamic masking is strictly cochlear, and is associated with cochlear outerhair-cell processing. This form is responsible for dynamic nonlinear ...

Masking is a popular countermeasure against side channel attacks. Many practical works use Boolean masking because of its simplicity, ease of implementation and comparably low performance overhead. Some recent works have explored masking schemes with higher algebraic complexity and have shown that they provide more security than Boolean masking at the cost of higher overheads. In particular, ma...

tics are described in this paper. We show that anisotropic diffusion can be seen as a robust estimation procedure that estimates a piecewise smooth image from a noisy input image. The “edge-~topping~’ function in the anisotropic diffusion equation is closely related to the error norm and influence function in the robust estimation framework. This connection leads to a new “edge-stopping’’ funct...

& In a backward masking paradigm, a target stimulus is rapidly (<100 msec) followed by a second stimulus. This typically results in a dramatic decrease in the visibility of the target stimulus. It has been shown that masking reduces responses in V1. It is not known, however, which process in V1 is affected by the mask. In the past, we have shown that in V1, modulations of neural activity that a...

We present techniques for performing luminance mapping and unsharp-masking-like processing on digital images; they are specifically designed for their application on bounded and on circular signals. We study the effect of gamma correction on contrast and develop an adaptive technique for luminance and contrast correction. We use the proposed tools for the enhancement of high contrast color images.

This paper presents an exhaustive evaluation of the quality of an audio watermarking algorithm. The integration of the psychoacoustic model into the audio watermarking approach is demonstrated. The quality parameter relating the power of the watermark noise and the masking threshold is presented. The evaluation method is detailed and the quality of the watermarked audio tracks is evaluated with...

The Modified Bark Spectral Distortion (MBSD), used for an objective speech quality measure, was presented previously [1]. The MBSD measure takes into account the noise masking threshold in order to use only audible distortions in the calculation of the distortion measure. Preliminary simulation results have shown improvement of the MBSD over the conventional BSD. In this paper, performance of t...

In this paper we introduce a class of morphological operators with applications to sharpening digitized grey valued images. We introduce t.he underlying partial differential equation (PDE) that governs this class of operators. For discrete implementations of the operator class! we show that instances utilizing a parabolic structuring function, have special properties that lead to an efficient i...