Copy-move forgery can be used for hiding certain objects or duplicating meaningful objects in images. Although copy-move forgery detection has been studied extensively in recent years, it is still a challenging task to distinguish between the source and the target regions in copy-move forgery images. In this paper, a convolutional neural network-transformer based generative adversarial network (CNN-T GAN) is proposed to distinguish the source and target regions in a copy-move forged image. A generator is first utilized to generate a mask that is similar to the groundtruth mask. Then, a discriminator is trained to discriminate the true image pairs from the false ones. When the discriminator cannot discriminate the true/false image pairs accurately, the generator can be used to obtain the final localization maps of copy-move forgery. In the generator, convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformer are exploited to extract the local features and global representations in copy-move forgery images, respectively. In addition, feature coupling layers are designed to integrate the features in CNN branch and transformer branch in an interactive way. Finally, a new Pearson correlation layer is introduced to match the similarity features in source and target regions, which can improve the performance of copy-move forgery localization, especially the localization performance on source regions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to utilize transformer for feature extraction in copy-move forgery localization. The proposed method can not only detect the copy-move regions, but also distinguish the source and target regions. Extensive experimental results on several commonly used copy-move datasets have shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for copy-move detection.

Advancements in digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), fog/edge/cloud computing, and cyber-physical systems have revolutionized a broad spectrum of smart city applications. The significant contributions and rapid developments of advanced artificial intelligence-based technologies and approaches, like, machine learning and deep learning, which are applied for extracting accurate information from extensive data, perform a potential role in IoT applications. Moreover, blockchain technology's fast adoption also contributes a significant role in the development of the new digital smart city ecosystem. Thus, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology convergence revolutionize smart city infrastructures to establish sustainable ecosystems for IoT applications. Nevertheless, these advancements and technological improvements also provide both opportunities and challenges for developing sustainable IoT applications. This paper aims to examine the convergence of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, a unique driver towards technological transformation in intelligent and sustainable IoT applications. We mainly discussed the advantages of blockchain technology that might promote the advancement and development of sustainable IoT applications. On the basis of the discussion, we introduced a smart and sustainable conceptual framework that leverages cloud computing, IoT devices, and artificial intelligence to process and obtain necessary information. The system provides digital analytics and saves results in decentralized cloud repositories through blockchain technology to promote various applications. Moreover, the layer-based architecture allows a sustainable incentive structure, which can possibly assist secure and protected smart city applications. We reviewed the enhanced solutions, summing up the key points that can be applied for generating various artificial intelligence and blockchain-based systems. Also, we discussed the issues that still remain open and our future research goals; that can introduce new ideas and future guidelines for sustainable IoT applications.

In location-based social networks (LBSNs), extensive user check-in data incorporating user preferences for location is collected through Internet of Things devices, including cell phones and other sensing devices. However, directly acquiring the preferences of spars users remains an open challenge. This article offers a point-of-interest (POI) category recommendation model based on group preferences (PPCM). This model is proposed for three reasons: 1) because data influence the training of a deep learning model, the group influence of users is taken into account. To protect the privacy of users’ check-in records and classify similar users into the same group, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is used; 2) a successive POI category recommendation model should capture the long- and short-term dependence ability. The attention mechanism and a temporal sliding window are paired with the long short-term memory (LSTM). This paradigm is useful for efficiently mining users’ long-term dependencies and interests; and 3) although the overall users’ check-in data are vast, check-in location options are also massive for a single user. There is a scarcity of data that may be utilized to mine user interests. Thus, instead of using POI, we leverage the POI category to better mine the user’s interests. On real check-in data sets from New York City and Tokyo, the PPCM is compared to other models. The comparison results indicate that the PPCM has improved recommendation performance.

To securely transmit secret data between Internet of Things (IoT) nodes, it is required to the implement information hiding technique for secure communication in the IoT environment. The traditional information hiding approaches generally select a multimedia file, such as texts, images, and video clips as the cover, and then embed secret information into the cover by slight modification. However, it is not feasible to directly apply these approaches in the IoT environment for the following reasons. First, it is hard for some IoT nodes to effectively and efficiently process and transmit the complex multimedia data. Second, the modification trace left in the cover will cause the presence of hidden secret information to be easily exposed by steganalysis tools. To address the above issues, we propose a coverless information hiding scheme based on probability graph learning for secure communication in the IoT environment. Instead of modifying an existing multimedia cover, we conceal secret information in a generated sequence of IoT data to realize secure communication between different nodes in the IoT environment. According to the node-data interaction relationships, we first learn the transition probability graph (TPG) to describe the transition probabilities between IoT data elements. Then, guided by a given secret message that needs to be hidden, we sequentially select a set of highly correlated data elements from the TPG to generate the sequence. The experimental results and theoretical analysis demonstrate that the proposed information hiding scheme can achieve high hiding capacity with desirable imperceptibility and security performances in the IoT environment.

Image splicing can be easily used for illegal activities such as falsifying propaganda for political purposes and reporting false news, which may result in negative impacts on society. Hence, it is highly required to detect spliced images and localize the spliced regions. In this work, we propose a multi-task squeeze and excitation network (SE-Network) for splicing localization. The proposed network consists of two streams, namely label mask stream and edge-guided stream, both of which adopt convolutional encoder-decoder architecture. The information from the edge-guided stream is transmitted to the label mask stream for enhancing the discrimination of features between the spliced and host regions. This work has three main contributions. First, image edges, along with label masks and mask edges, are exploited to supply more comprehensive supervision for the localization of spliced regions. Second, the low-level feature maps extracted from shallow layers are fused with the high-level feature maps from deep layers to provide more reliable feature for splicing localization. Finally, several squeeze and excitation attention modules are incorporated into the network to recalibrate the fused features to enhance the feature expression. Extensive experiments show that the proposed multi-task SE-Network outperforms existing splicing localization methods evidently on two synthetic splicing datasets and four benchmark splicing datasets.

Through the collaboration of cloud and edge, cloud-edge computing allows the edge that approximates end-users undertakes those non-computationally intensive service processing of the cloud, reducing the communication overhead and satisfying the low latency requirement of Internet of Vehicle (IoV). With cloud-edge computing, the computing tasks in IoV is able to be delivered to the edge servers (ESs) instead of the cloud and rely on the deployed services of ESs for a series of processing. Due to the storage and computing resource limits of ESs, how to dynamically deploy partial services to the edge is still a puzzle. Moreover, the decision of service deployment often requires the transmission of local service requests from ESs to the cloud, which increases the risk of privacy leakage. In this article, a method for privacy-aware IoV service deployment with federated learning in cloud-edge computing, named PSDF, is proposed. Technically, federated learning secures the distributed training of deployment decision network on each ES by the exchange and aggregation of model weights, avoiding the original data transmission. Meanwhile, homomorphic encryption is adopted for the uploaded weights before the model aggregation on the cloud. Besides, a service deployment scheme based on deep deterministic policy gradient is proposed. Eventually, the performance of PSDF is evaluated by massive experiments.

Quantization plays a pivotal role in JPEG compression with respect to the tradeoff between image fidelity and storage size, and the blind estimation of quantization parameters has attracted considerable interest in the fields of image steganalysis and forensics. Existing estimation methods have made great progress, but they usually suffer a sharp decline in accuracy when addressing small-size JPEG decompressed bitmaps due to the insufficiency of coefficients. Aiming to alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a generic clustering-based framework to improve the performance of the existing methods. The core idea is to gather as many coefficients as possible by clustering subbands before feeding them into a step estimator. The proposed framework is implemented using hierarchical clustering with two kinds of histogram-like features. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on a variety of images of different sizes and quality factors, and the results show that notable improvements can be achieved. In addition to quantization step estimation, we believe the idea behind the proposed framework might provide inspiration for other forensic tasks to alleviate their performance issues induced by sample insufficiency.

As silicon integration complexity increases with 3D stacking and Through-Silicon-Via (TSV), so does the occurrence of memory and IO defects and associated test and validation time. This ultimately leads to an overall cost increase. On a 14nm Intel SOC, a reusable BIST engine called Converged-Pattern-Generator-Checker (CPGC) are architected to detect memory and IO defects, and combined with the software assisted repair technology to automatically repair memory cell defects on 3D stacked Wide-IO DRAM. Additionally, we also present the CPGC gate count, power, simulation, and silicon results. The reusable CPGC IP is designed to connect to a standard IP interface, which enables a quick turn-key SOC development cycle. Silicon results show CPGC can speed up validation by 5x, improve test time from minutes down to seconds, and decrease debug time by 5x including root-cause of boot failures of the memory interface. CPGC is also used in memory training and initialization, which makes it a critical part of Intel SOC.