In this paper, a watermarking scheme based on the parametric slant-Hadamard transform is presented. Our approach divides the image into separate blocks and applies the parametric slant-Hadamard transform on each block individually. Then based on a blind scheme, the watermark is inserted in the transform domain and the inverse transform is carried out. The advantage of the selected transform is ...

Interruptions and distractions are a feature of work in most complex sociotechnical systems in which people must handle multiple threads of work. Over the last 10–15 years there has been a crescendo of reviews and investigations into the impact that interruptions and distractions have on safety-critical aspects of healthcare work, such as medication administration, but findings are still inconc...

This paper presents a data hiding technique based on a new compression enhancement called Film Grain Technology. Film grain is a midfrequency noise-like pattern naturally appearing in imagery captured on film. The Film Grain Technology is a method for modeling and removing the film grain, thus enhancing the compression efficiency, and then using the model parameters to create synthetic film gra...

This paper explores the fidelity of queries issued in pervasive computing networks. A query’s fidelity, or how well its results reflect the state of the environment, can be significantly impacted by dynamics that occur during its distributed execution. We focus on continuous queries that can be built out of sequences of consecutive snapshot queries and show how the fidelity of snapshots can be ...

Hands play an important role in the spread of many viruses, thus proper and regular handwashing is considered crucial in preventing such spread, particularly in health-care settings, day-care centers, and food-handling establishments. Many viruses that are known to spread through contaminated hands can remain infectious for several hours on human hands, and also may be more resistant than the b...

We show that the fidelity decay between an initial eigenstate evolved under a unitary chaotic operator and the same eigenstate evolved under a perturbed operator saturates well before the 1=N limit expected for a generic initial state, where N is the dimension of the Hilbert space. We provide a theoretical argument and numerical evidence that, for perturbations of intermediate strength, the sat...

For applications of volume visualization in medicine, it is important to assure that the 3D images show the true anatomical situation, or at least to know about their limitations. In this paper, various methods for evaluation of image quality are reviewed. They are classified based on the fundamental terms of intelligibility and fidelity, and discussed with respect to the question what clues th...

OBJECTIVES To discuss methods of preservation of treatment fidelity in health behavior change trials conducted in public health contexts. METHODS The treatment fidelity framework provided by the National Institutes of Health's Behavioral Change Consortium includes five domains of treatment fidelity (Study Design, Training, Delivery, Receipt, and Enactment). A measure of treatment fidelity was...