Dengue Fever: A Continuous Threat

Dengue fever is a vector borne disease and is caused by DEN Virus. This virus has four different serotypes. The vectors are two mosquitoes known as Aedesaegypti (the yellow fever mosquito) and Aedesalbopictus(the Asian tiger mosquito).  First case of dengue fever was reported back in 1994 in Karachi. A complete outbreak of this epidemic shook the whole nation in 2012. Uptill now, Lahore a city full of culture, witnessed about 16,580 confirmed cases and 257 deaths. About 5000 confirmed cases with 60 deaths were reported from the rest of the provinces. Under guidelines of WHO, Government has made efforts to combat this epidemic. Although the overall efforts have minimized the outbreak on controllable levels but dengue fever is a continuous threat. Since no permanent cure is available, the transmission of DEN virus is controlled indirectly. So the prime focus is to control mosquito population and decrease the possible hot spots i.e. Mosquito breeding sites in human habitations. Every year, the country witnesses monsoon season which brings vast areas full of clear standing waters providing breeding sites for mosquitoes which ultimately leads to increased number of patients suffering from dengue fever. Efforts have been made to fight against dengue including formation of dengue wards in hospitals, vector surveillance, community education, reactive vector control etc. A study has shown prevalence of four mosquito genera in Pakistan including Aedes, Culex, Armigeresand Anopheles. All of the above mentioned genera are associated with disease transmissions as they are the vectors of different viruses and parasites. It is the need of hour to do a collaborative effort stressing the community mobilization and management in war against dengue.

Multimedia Watermarking Using Intelligent Techniques

Increase in research and commercial interest is observed in the area of digital watermarking in current era. Main reason behind this development is the extensive use of internet with high speed and bandwidth availability. As a result, sharing of multimedia content is increased significantly, which rises need for copyright protection and authentication. Digital watermarking provides vast commercial applications for securing content of different multimedia objects. However, watermarking can cause permanent loss in the content of the object. Different sensitive multimedia objects like medical, military, scientific etc. do not tolerate such permanent loss. Therefore, the distortion needs to be minimized or completely eliminated so that the true purpose of the multimedia content can be retained. Numerous watermarking techniques are available for different sensitive applications. Our objective is to propose reversible and secure techniques for watermarking different multimedia objects. Robust watermarking approaches are targeted in this research. Main focus is to achieve maximum watermarking capacity and to minimize embedding distortion, while preserving functional capability of the underlying multimedia object. Two different types of multimedia objects are targeted in our dissertation; these include relational databases and DNA medium. Genetic algorithm is selected in order to apply intelligent techniques for improving different properties of digital watermarking. Two relational database watermarking approaches are designed and developed; both approaches are reversible, robust, and follow the distortion tolerance of the attributes. First approach uses genetic algorithm to improve capacity, reduce distortion, and false positive rate of the difference expansion based watermarking technique. Whereas, second approach improves watermarking capacity, reduces distortion, and false positive rate of the reversible contrast mapping, which is first time designed for relational databases. A robust data hiding technique for DNA medium is proposed, which increases watermark capacity by improving current synonymous substitution technique and resists mutation losses. Moreover, synonymous substitution does not causes any disturbance in the amino acid sequence, thus the DNA functionality is retained. In order to tackle different DNA mutations binary strings and Reed Solomon Codes are applied. The watermark is encoded before embedding using Reed Solomon Codes and the structural information is retained using binary strings.