Public camera feeds are increasingly being opened to use by multiple authorities (e.g., police, fire, traffic) as well as to the public. Because of the difficulty and insecurity of sharing cryptographic keys, these data are available in the clear. However, authorities must have a mechanism to assure trust in the video, that is, to authenticate it. While lossless video is straightforward to authenticate by cryptographic means, lossy video as may result from UDP, wireless, or transcoded transmissions, is more difficult to authenticate. We describe a method that combines a concise and efficiently computed video fingerprint with public key cryptography. Essential components of our approach are: the procedure to combine inexact video fingerprint with exact digital signature to enable lossy authentication, and matching for misaligned video via a major incline approach. Experimental results relate video fingerprint length to authentication accuracy and latency (time to authentication).

CPU and device virtualization technology allows applications to be hosted on cloud platforms; some of the resulting benefits are lower cost and greater elasticity. In such cloud hosted applications, some components reside on the cloud while others, such as end users and components tied to physical devices, are located outside the cloud. Many applications, e.g., telecom services, have stringent latency requirements in terms of within how much time certain procedures must be completed. The application latency is strongly determined by the locations of all the interacting components that are both within and outside the cloud. In this paper, we study the problem of determining the optimal placement of the application components in the cloud so that the latency requirements of the application can be met. We present a precise formulation of the placement problem which includes a specification of the cloud platform, and collective latency expressions for application-level latency requirements. We show that Message Sequence Charts (MSCs), a widely-used mechanism for describing the execution of application procedures, can be naturally translated into our formalism of collective latency expressions. We present placement algorithms that exploit the Euclidean triangular inequality property of network topologies: (a) an exact algorithm for determining the most optimal placement but which has a worst-case exponential running time, and (b) an algorithm for determining a close to-optimal placement that has a fast polynomial running time. Additionally, we present an exact technique for partitioning a placement problem into smaller sub problems so that greater efficiency and accuracy can be achieved. We evaluate the performance of the algorithms on a representative telecom application --- a distributed deployment of the LTE Mobility Management Entity (MME). Our evaluation results show that our approximate algorithm can outperform a random placement by up to 49% for finding a successful placement.

This paper introduces a method for the efficient comparison and retrieval of near duplicates of a query video from a video database. The method generates video signatures from histograms of orientations of optical flow of feature points computed from uniformly sampled video frames concatenated over time to produce time series, which are then aligned and matched. Major incline matching, a data reduction and peak alignment method for time series, is adapted for faster performance. The resultant method is compact and robust against a number of common transformations including: flipping, cropping, picture-in-picture, photometric, addition of noise and other artifacts. We evaluate on the MUSCLE VCD 2007 dataset and a dataset derived from TRECVID 2009. Good precision (average 88.8%) at significantly higher speeds (average durations: 45 seconds for signature generation plus 92 seconds for a linear search of 81-second query video in a 300 hour dataset) than results reported in the literature are shown.

Various methods of content-based video copy detection have been proposed to find video copies in a large video database. In this paper, we represent video feature obtained by global and/or local detectors as signature time series. We observe that the curves of such time series under various kinds of modifications and transformations follow similar trends. Based on this observation, we propose to use linear segmentation to approximate the time series and extract major inclines from those linear segments. We develop a major incline-based fast alignment method to find potential alignment positions between the compared videos. Further, taking advantage of the major incline-based fast alignment, a Frame Insertion, Deletion, and Substitutions (FIDS) detection method is introduced to detect video copies in the presence of frame order changes. Our proposed solution is simple and generic. It can be combined with existing global or local feature descriptions, and with sequence or keyframe based matching schemes. It speeds up the video copy detection process by reducing the search space to the areas suggested by the potential alignments. Experiments using both the MUSCLE VCD 2007 and TRECVID CBCD 2009 datasets show that the proposed solution significantly accelerates the overall video copy detection process and at the same time achieves good precision.

In this position paper we introduce Virtual Telco, a comprehensive effort to simplify the management of deployed telecommunication services by using a Cloud computing approach. The main objective of Virtual Telco is to replace the costly dedicated hardware implementing several centralized control plane functions and other services with distributed solutions that may be allocated on-demand over a pool of dependable, dynamically contracted computing and networking resources that are easy to manage. Virtual Telco relies on state-of-the-art techniques in the domains of virtualization and distributed systems to meet the challenging criteria of reliability, scalability, and timeliness required by present and future telecommunication standards and services. As a representative example of a Virtual Telco application, we propose the case of the distributed mobility management entity (MME) for next-generation LTE cellular networks.

We describe the architecture of a system for reading machine-printed documents in known predefined tabular-data layout styles. In these tables, textual data are presented in record lines made up of fixed-width fields. Tables often do not rely on line-art (ruled lines) to delimit fields, and in this way differ crucially from fixed forms. Our system performs these steps: copes with multiple tables per page; identifies records within tables; segments records into fields; and recognizes characters within fields, constrained by field-specific contextual knowledge. Obstacles to good performance on tables include small print, tight line-spacing, poor-quality text (such as photocopies), and line-art or background patterns that touch the text. Precise skew-correction and pitch-estimation, and high-performance OCR using neural nets proved crucial in overcoming these obstacles. The most significant technical advances in this work appear to be algorithms for identifying and segmenting records with known layout, and integration of these algorithms with a graphical user interface (GUI) for defining new layouts. This GUI has been ergonomically designed to make efficient and intuitive use of exemplary images, so that the skill and manual effort required to retarget the system to new table layouts are held to a minimum. The system has been applied in this way to more than 400 distinct tabular layouts. During the last three years the system has read over fifty million records with high accuracy.