Mobile Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (MWSANs) can simply be defined as an extension of Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) in which the actor nodes are mobile. As such, in addition to challenges existing in WSAN, the mobility also imposes new challenges such as localization of actors, cooperative tracking of both actor-actor and actor-sensor collaboration, and communication infrastructure between distant actors. New communication protocols, specific to MWSANs, are needed. In this paper, we propose a self-organization and data collection protocol in order to provide energy efficiency, low latency, high success rate and suitably interactions between sensors and actors and take benefit from the mobility and resources existing on the network's actor nodes. The actor nodes move according to RWP mobility model. Each actor, during its pause time creates a temporary cluster, and is the head of it, collects and processes sensor data and performs actions on the environment based on the information gathered from sensor nodes in its cluster. Once an actor detects a base station it delivers the collected data to it. The simulations carried out (with TOSSIM tool), comfort us with good performances results.

In this paper, we propose a novel self-organization protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) assisted by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV or Drone) called SSP (Self-organization Smart Protocol). In order to provide energy efficiency, low latency, high success rate and suitably interactions between sensors and UAVs while taking advantage of the air mobility (fly) and resource available on the UAVs in the network. The UAVs move according to RWP (Random Waypoint) mobility model. Each UAV, during its pause time at a known height, creates a temporary cluster, and acts as its head, collects and processes sensor data and performs actions on the environment based on the information gathered from sensor nodes in its cluster. Once an UAV detects a base station (BS) it forwards the collected data to it. The results of the simulations show the high performance of the proposed algorithm.

Scene text presents challenging characteristics mainly related to acquisition circumstances and environmental changes resulting in low quality videos. In this paper, we present a scene text detection algorithm based on pseudo Zernike moments (PZMs) and stroke features from low resolution lecture videos. Algorithm mainly consists of three steps: slide detection, text detection and segmentation and non-text filtering. In lecture videos, slide region is a key object carrying almost all important information; hence slide region has to be extracted and segmented from other scene objects considered as background for later processing. Slide region detection and segmentation is done by applying pseudo Zernike moment's based on RGB frames. Text detection and extraction is performed using PZMs segmentation over V channel of HSV colour space, and then stroke feature is used to filter out non-text region and to remove false positives. The algorithm is robust to illumination, low resolution and uneven luminance from compressed videos. Effectiveness of PZM description leads to very few false positives comparing to other approached. Moreover resulting images can be used directly by OCR engines and no more processing is needed.

With the huge increase of large-scale multimedia over Internet, especially images, building Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems for large-scale images has become a big challenge. One of the drawbacks associated with CBIR is the very long execution time. In this article, we propose a fast Content-Based Image Retrieval system using Spark (CBIR-S) targeting large-scale images. Our system is composed of two steps. (i) image indexation step, in which we use MapReduce distributed model on Spark in order to speed up the indexation process. We also use a memory-centric distributed storage system, called Tachyon, to enhance the write operation (ii) image retrieving step which we speed up by using a parallel k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) search method based on MapReduce model implemented under Apache Spark, in addition to exploiting the cache method of spark framework. We have showed, through a wide set of experiments, the effectiveness of our approach in terms of processing time.

This paper proposes a compromise-tolerant (t,n)-threshold certification management scheme for MANETs. Our solution allows to mitigate the impact of compromised nodes that participate in the certification service. In our design, certification management is achieved anonymously by an Anonymous Certification Authority (ACA). The latter is fully distributed into multiple disjointed coalitions of nodes whose structure is made hidden. This prevents an adversary from taking the control of the ACA by arbitrarily compromising t or more nodes. In other words, our proposal enhances the compromise-tolerance to more than the threshold number t of nodes without breaking down the whole certification system. As a result, our scheme requires a very smaller threshold than traditional schemes, which improves considerably the service availability. The experimental study shows a clear advantage over traditional threshold-based certification schemes by ensuring a significant positive compromise between security and availability of certification service.

The security of multimedia documents becomes an urgent need, especially with the increasing image falsifications provided by the easy access and use of image manipulation tools. Hence, usage of image authentication techniques fulfills this need. In this paper, we propose an effective self-embedding fragile watermarking scheme for color images tamper detection and restoration. To decrease the capacity of insertion, a Bayer pattern is used to reduce the color host image into a gray-level watermark, to further improve the security Torus Automorphism permutation is used to scramble the gray-level watermark. In our algorithm, three copies of the watermark are inserted over three components (R, G, and B channels) of the color host image, providing a high probability of detection accuracy and recovery if one copy is destroyed. In the tamper detection process, a majority voting technique is used to determine the legitimacy of the image and recover the tampered regions after interpolating the extracted gray-level watermark. Using our proposed method, tampering rate can achieve 25% with a high visual quality of recovered image and PSNR values greater than 34 (dB). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method affords three major properties: the high quality of watermarked image, the sensitive tamper detection and high localization accuracy besides the high-quality of recovered image.

This article presents a computer vision system for real-time detection and robust recognition of speed limit signs, specially designed for intelligent vehicles. First, a new segmentation method is proposed to segment the image, and the CHT transformation (circle hog transform) is used to detect circles. Then, a new method based on local binary patterns is proposed to filter segmented images in order to reduce false alarms. In the classification phase, a cascading architecture of two linear support vector machines is proposed. The first is trained on the GTSRB dataset to decide whether the detected region is a speed limit sign or not, and the second is trained on the MNIST dataset to recognize the sign numbers. The system achieves a classification recall of 99.81% with a precision of 99.08% on the GTSRB dataset; in addition, the system is also tested on the BTSD and STS datasets, and it achieves a classification recall of 99.39% and 98.82% with a precision of 99.05% and 98.78%, respectively, within a processing time of 11.22 ms.

Multilevel thresholding is a widely used technique to perform image segmentation. It consists of dividing an input image into several distinct regions by finding the optimal thresholds according to a certain objective function. In this work, we generalize the use of the SSIM quality measure as an objective function to solve the multilevel thresholding problem using empirically tuned swarm intelligence algorithms. The experimental study we have conducted shows that our approach, producing near-exact solutions, is more effective compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we show that the computation complexity has been significantly reduced by adopting a shared-memory parallel programming paradigm for all the algorithms we have implemented.

Recently, the identification of an individual race has become an important research topic in face recognition systems, especially in large-scale face images. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale race classification method which combines Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Logistic Regression (LR) on Spark framework. LBP is used to extract features from facial images, while spark’s logistic regression is used as a classifier to improve the accuracy and speedup the classification system. The race recognition method is performed on Spark framework to process, in a parallel way, a large scale of data. The evaluation of our proposed method has been performed on two large face image datasets CAS-PEAL and Color FERET. Two major races were considered for this work, including Asian and Non-Asian races. As a result, we achieve the highest race classification accuracy (99.99%) compared to Linear SVM, Naive Bayesian (NB), Random Forest(RF), and Decision Tree (DT) Spark’s classifiers. Our method is compared against different state-of-the-art methods on race classification, the obtained results show that our approach is more efficient in terms of accuracy and processing time.

Due to the intrinsically geo-distributed subcontracting maintenance activity practice, the maintenance scheduling has for a long time been a major challenge in the industry. This research work presents a methodology to schedule the maintenance activities of geo-distributed assets. A multi-agent system based approach is proposed to enable the decision-making for the subcontractors in a distributed industrial environment under uncertainty. An auction based negotiation mechanism is designed to promote competition and cooperation among the different agents, and to obtain global good schedule.Compared to the Weighted Shortest Processing Time first–Heuristic–Earliest Due Date (WSPT-H-EDD) method, the experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to provide scheduling scheme with good performances in terms of Global Cost, Total Weighted Tardiness Cost and makespan.

Today’s, and near future, communication networks rely heavily on capacity expansion to keep pace with the massive number of mobile devices and ever-increasing mobile traffic. This expansion can be achieved through three major ingredients, namely, adding more wireless-spectrum, efficient usage of this spectrum, and adequate networks’ architectures. In this paper, a proposition for integrating these three ingredients in a cognitive-radio-inspired framework is presented. The focus is on the integration of the idle spectrum resources of different wireless networks into a single mobile heterogeneous wireless network. This framework is based on a conceptual network-architecture articulated with a generic and cooperative spectrum-harvesting scheme. The former brings the necessary agility for such heterogeneous environments, the latter keeps the network supplied with the vital spectrum resources. In our proposal, we make use of cross-correlated sequences (CCSs) for context-aware events’ signaling purposes. This choice is motivated by the particularly interesting characteristics of CCSs, namely, duration shortness, robustness to bad radio conditions, detection rather than decoding, and low probability of collision. As an illustration, we propose a reporting and detection scheme, in the context of OFDMA systems, and provide performance results from simulations to validate our proposal.

Due to the intrinsically geo-distributed subcontracting maintenance activity practice, the maintenance scheduling has for a long time been a major challenge in the industry. This research work presents a methodology to schedule the maintenance activities of geo-distributed assets. A multi-agent system based approach is proposed to enable the decision-making for the subcontractors in a distributed industrial environment under uncertainty. An auction based negotiation mechanism is designed to promote competition and cooperation among the different agents, and to obtain global good schedule.Compared to the Weighted Shortest Processing Time first–Heuristic–Earliest Due Date (WSPT-H-EDD) method, the experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to provide scheduling scheme with good performances in terms of Global Cost, Total Weighted Tardiness Cost and makespan.

Securing the network communication represents one of the most important challenges in wireless sensor networks. The key distribution problem has been widely discussed in classical wireless sensor networks contrarily to heterogeneous ones. HWSNs (Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks) have optimized the network capability and opened new security opportunities by introducing high resource capacity sensor nodes in the network. In this paper, an efficient dynamic authentication and key Management scheme is proposed for heterogeneous WSN. The main idea is to provide a single lightweight protocol for both authentication and key establishment while optimizing the security level. The key distribution algorithm is based on preexisting information to generate dynamic keys and does not require any secure channel and sharing phase which improves the security, energy efficiency and reduces the memory consumption. Experimental results have confirmed the performances of our mechanism compared to some of the existing security protocols.

Actually, wireless sensor networks represent a substantial part in IoT. However, their limitation requires a special consideration in IoT applications. For their integration with the internet, it is necessary to adapt such networks using different middleware, with taking into account various challenges such as heterogeneity and interoperability.

Previously Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the suitable design, but with a better practice, a new design called microservice becomes the leader due to its high performance and its suitability for IoT applications.

In this paper, we first survey the most important middleware that have been proposed to handle WSN through IoT. Also, we discuss the most crucial microservices that handle different integration factors by making them supported by the proposed middleware. Our proposal is inspired from artificial neural network architecture to allow dynamic service interaction; it supports unlimited services with a regard to various device capabilities separately of the cloud technologies. Moreover, the evaluation of our design clearly shows that our middleware allows a lightweight WSN integration with IoT regarding to their limitations and requirements.

Identification schemes based on multivariate polynomials have been receiving attraction in different areas due to the quantum secure property. Identification is one of the most important elements for the IoT to achieve communication between objects, gather and share information with each other. Thus, identification schemes which are post-quantum secure are significant for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Various polar forms of multivariate quadratic and cubic polynomial systems have been proposed for these identification schemes. There is a need to define polar form for multivariate dth degree polynomials, where d ≥ 4 . In this paper, we propose a solution to this need by defining constructions for multivariate polynomials of degree d ≥ 4 . We give a generic framework to construct the identification scheme for IoT and RFID applications. In addition, we compare identification schemes and curve-based cryptoGPS which is currently used in RFID applications.

Recently, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is captivating growing attention because of their suitability for enormous range of new types of context-aware applications and services. This is attributed to the fact that modern smartphones are equipped with unprecedented sensing, computing, and communication capabilities that allow them to perform more complex tasks besides their inherent calling features. Despite a number of merits, MCS confronts new challenges due to network dynamics, the huge volume of data, sensing task coordination, and the user privacy problems. In this paper, a comprehensive review of MCS is presented. First, we highlight the distinguishing features and potential advantages of MCS compared to conventional sensor networks. Then, a taxonomy of MCS is devised based on sensing scale, level of user involvement and responsiveness, sampling rate, and underlying network infrastructure. Afterward, we categorize and classify prominent applications of MCS in environmental, infrastructure, social, and behavioral domains. The core architecture of MCS is also described. Finally, we describe the potential advantages, determine and reiterate the open research challenges of MCS and illustrate possible solutions.