The latest video coding standard, versatile video coding (VVC), was developed to achieve higher video compression efficiency and support more media applications than its predecessor, high-efficiency video coding (HEVC). To address nontranslational motion, such as rotation and zooming, affine motion compensation has been employed in VVC during interframe prediction. However, the complexity increases significantly due to a large number of linear equation solving steps during affine motion estimation (AME). To address the problem, this paper proposes a fast linear equation solving algorithm and an accompanying pipelined hardware architecture design. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to address the hardware architecture design of the linear equation solving algorithm in affine mode. First, an integer-based division-free algorithm (I-DFA) is proposed to achieve fast equation solving. Then, a novel dynamic scaling algorithm is proposed to compensate for integer computation errors due to overflow problems. Finally, a pipelined and interleaved hardware architecture is proposed to minimize the number of iteration clock cycles and improve the throughput. The proposed algorithm achieves average time savings of 5.3% and 5.7% with only 0.03% and 0.07% increase in the Bjøntegaard delta bit rate (BD-BR) under low-delay P (LDP) and random access (RA) configurations, respectively. The proposed hardware architecture can solve 16.7M six-parameter affine systems of linear equations per second under a working frequency of 100MHz, which represents a 21x improvement compared to the existing methods.

Scholarly journals (SJ) play an indispensable role in the scrutiny and dissemination of research. However, the current SJ and academic paper publishing infrastructure is fragmented and dependent on centralised servers compelling researchers to hop from one journal platform to another for familiarity, account registration and subsequent usage. In this work, we advance a secure blockchain-based multi-tenant decentralised framework dubbed JPBlock to facilitate paper submission through publication and discoverability. Leveraging fundamental attributes of blockchain, smart contract and decentralised storage technology, we advance novel capabilities including paper tracking, proof of authorship and voting on reputation of journals while enforcing core security principles on-chain and off-chain. Open access papers are made available on a global scale while non-open access papers are securely encrypted supporting the subscription-like model. Results from our proof-of-concept implementation reveal that the framework is feasible and satisfies fundamental security requirements with journals and authors incurring overall costs of $46.66 and $25.61 respectively.

Abstract COVID‐19 pandemic undoubtedly lingers on and has brought unprecedented changes globally including travel arrangements. Blockchain‐based solutions have been proposed to aid travel amid the pandemic hap. Presently, extant solutions are country or regional‐based, downplay privacy, non‐responsive, often impractical, and come with blockchain‐related complexities presenting technological hurdle for travelers. We therefore propose a solution namely, Borderless to foster global travel allowing travelers and countries collaboratively engage in a secure adaptive proof protocol dubbed Proof‐of‐COVID‐19 status a number of arbitrary statements to ascertain the fact that the traveler poses no danger irrespective of the country located. As far as we know, this is first of its kind. Borderless is implemented as a decentralized application leveraging blockchain as a trust anchor and decentralized storage technology. Security analysis and evaluation are performed proving security, privacy‐preservation, and cost‐effectiveness along with implementation envisioning it as a blueprint to facilitate cross‐border travel during the present and future pandemics. Our experimental results show it takes less than 60 and 3 s to onboard users and perform proof verification respectively attesting to real usability scenarios along with the traits of arbitrary proofs to aid responsiveness to the dynamics of pandemics and blockchain abstraction from travelers.

The barriers of food enterprises and departments caused information asymmetry, which is the root cause of food safety incidents. Simultaneously, it is challenging to solve the information asymmetry by the existing cloud-based food supply-chain regulation system. Establishing a secure and reliable data sharing environment is an effective solution to the information island. Blockchain can construct a security network based on mathematical algorithms, eliminating the third party’s potential security risk, and realize transparently share data. In this paper, on the principle of metadata remaining in the food enterprises, we propose a blockchain-cloud fusion scheme based on Decentralized Attribute-Based Signature (DABS) to realize secure data sharing between departments. It constructs a decentralized and trusting environment for data owners to share data and achieves social co-governance of food safety based on the smart contract. It can also preserve the existing system architecture and complement the performance disadvantage of blockchain and cloud storage. The result achieved from security analysis shows that our scheme supports unconditional full anonymity and can resist collusion attacks of N-1 out of N corrupted attribute authorities.

Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) scheme can achieve information sharing of one-to-many users, without considering the number of users and the users identity. But, the traditional single Attribute Authority (AA) ABE scheme can hardly meet requirements of different agencies in distributed application environment and it is easy to form the system performance bottlenecks. Based on ciphertext-policy ABE scheme, this paper proposes a multi-authority revocable ABE scheme, where the classification manages user attributes, effectively relieving the management burden of single organization. In addition, it can achieve fine grained access control of shared information by adopting tree access strategy and secret sharing scheme, and support system attribute revocation. Finally, we show that the scheme is secure against chosen plaintext attack under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption.