Due to development of latest technologies in the areas of communication and computer networks, present businesses are moving to the digital world for effectiveness, convenience and security. One of the examples is in the area of medical applications, where traditional diagnosis is being replaced by e-diagnosis. This paradigm gave birth to number of applications in healthcare industry like teleconsulting, telesurgery and telediagnosis. All these applications require the exchange of medical images in digital format from one geographical location to another throughout the globe via a cheap and fast network such as Internet. However, digital form of medical image can easily be manipulated through image processing softwares. Insurance companies, hospitals as well as patients might want to modify the medical images for a number of reasons. The tampered images may be used for illegal purposes. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate how to protect a medical images, detect tampered images and recover the original image using the technique of Digital Watermarking. Watermarking tech- nology can be categorized into robust, fragile and semi-fragile watermarking, each serving for different purposes. In order to facilitate sharing and remote handling of medical images, we propose techniques to solve the problem of copyright protection and content authentication using robust and fragile watermarking respectively. In the first part of this dissertation, we design a fragile watermarking system for the exact authentication of medical images. The proposed system authenticates the computed tomography (CT) scan medical images of thorax area against different distortions. The system first enhances the embedding capacity of a CT scan image by isolating the actual lung parenchyma unlike classical watermarking techniques, which use logical square or ellipse for isolating region of interest (ROI). Secondly it embeds watermark only in region of non interest (RONI), thus not compromising the diagnosis value of medical image. The method utilizes the spatial domain watermarking and least significant bit (LSB) replacement method for embedding the watermark. Experimental results reveal that the proposed system detects both legitimate and illegitimate distortions. Robust watermarks are well suited for copyright protection because they stay intact with the image under various manipulations. In the second part of the dissertation, we investigate an approach of robust watermarking for protection of medical images which ensures the security of medical images against geomet- rical distortions. In the proposed method we firstly normalize the medical image using image moments in order to make it invariant against geometric transformations. Secondly, we select the salient regions in the normalized image based on feature points detected by Harris corner detector. Watermarking is performed in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain of salient regions by adapting block based embedding. The scheme is completely blind, that it does not require the original image to detect the watermark. We thus address the issue of tolerating affine transformations in medical images that is hardly be found in existing schemes of medical image watermarking. In third part of the dissertation, we investigate the complete reversible watermarking system. The proposed method uses integer wavelet transform and companding technique which can embed and recover the secret information as well as can restore the image to its pristine state. The method takes advantage of block based watermarking and iterative optimization of threshold for companding, which avoids histogram pre and post-processing. Consequently, it reduces the associated overhead usually required in most of the reversible watermarking techniques. As a result, it keeps the distortion small between the marked and the original images. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing reversible data hiding schemes reported in the literature.
چار اپریل کا وہ دن مجھے آج بھی اچھی طرح یاد ہے ۔کراچی میں ٹیپو سلطان روڈ پر واقع گھر کے باہر کھڑا تھا جب گلی گلی بٹنے والے خصوصی ضمیمے کی ایک کاپی میرے بھی ہاتھ آ گئی ۔اس لیے بھاگا بھاگا اندر دوڑا اور لا کر والد صاحب کے سامنے پیش کیا ۔انہوں نے ضمیمہ ہاتھ میں لیا ۔سرخی پر نظر پڑتے ہی جیسے سکتے میں آ گئے ۔آنکھیں جھپکنا بند ہو گئیں اور وہ بس اخبار کو تکتے رہے ۔کئی لمحے ایسے ہی گزر گئے میں نے انہیں ذرا ہلا کر پو چھا ۔’’آپ ٹھیک ہیں ‘‘انھوں نے گھور کر میری طرف دیکھا ۔ اس لمحے مجھے ان کی آنکھوں میں بہت غصہ نظر آ یا ۔جو جلد ہی گہرے صدمے میں بدل گیا ۔
ذوالفقار علی بھٹو کی پھانسی پر ہمارے گھر میں سوگ کا ماحول تھا اور ملک کے طول و عرض میں گہرا خوف ۔کسی کو یقین نہیں آ رہا تھا جنرل ضیاء اس حد تک جا سکتے ہیں ۔لیکن شاید ضیاء نے اپنی بقا کے لیے رحم کی تمام اپیلیں مسترد کر کے بھٹو کو تختہ ٔ دار پر لٹکا نا ناگزیر سمجھا ۔
ضیاء کے مارشل لا کی مخالفت کر نے والوں کے خلاف پہلے سے کریک ڈائون جاری تھا ۔ہر طرف ملٹری حکام کے ہاتھوں سیاسی کارکنوں کی پکڑ دھکڑ جاری تھی ۔خیر پور میں ہمارے گھروں پر فوجیوں نے چادر و چار دیواری کا تقدس پامال کرتے ہوئے چڑھائیاں کیں ۔خاندان کے کچھ مرد ادھر ادھر چھپ گئے لیکن دادا اور والد صاحب کو فوجیوں نے ہتھکڑیاں لگا کر پہلے تھا نے اور پھر جیل میں ڈال دیا ۔ایسے میں جیے بھٹو کا نعرہ فوجی آمریت کی مزاحمت بن گیا ۔ضیا اور اس کے ساتھی...
Women’s rights and freedom is one of the most debated subjects and the flash point of contemporary world. Women maintain a significant place in the society catered to them not only by the modern world but also by religion. Yet, the clash between Islamic and western civilization is that they have defined different set of duties for them. Islam considers women an important participatory member of the society by assigning them inclusive role, specifying certain fields of work to them, given the vulnerability they might fall victim to. Contrarily, Western world allows women to opt any profession of their choice regardless of tangible threats they may encounter. Apparently, the modern approach seems more attractive and favorable, but actually this is not plausible from Islamic point of view. Intermingling, co-gathering and sexual attraction of male and female are creating serious difficulties and problems for both genders, especially for women. Women are currently running many movements for their security, rights and liberties under the umbrella of “Feminism”. Due to excess of freedom and lack of responsibility, a radical movement came into existence which was named as ‘Radical Feminism’. This feminist movement is affecting the unique status of women in the whole world, especially in the west. This study seeks to explore radical feminism and its major impact on socio-religious norms in addition to its critical analysis from an Islamic perspective. Analytical research methodology will be adopted in this study with qualitative cum quantitative approach. This study reveals that the radical feminism has some notorious impacts on ethical, social and religious norms of the society, with especial reference to Muslims. Thus, it is a dire need of time to encounter these impact and consequences in the light of legal and moral approaches.
Facial expressions are the most effective form of non-verbal communication which is used to express one’s emotions. It not only expresses our expressions, but also communicates a wealth of information during social interaction. Facial expressions play an important and effective role in Human-Computer Interaction. Unlike humans, facial expression recognition is a challenging task for computers and research work in this domain can still be considered in seminal form. The prevalent facial expression techniques tend to provide accurate and impressive results for the images captured under controlled environment with a cooperative subject. However, majority of these techniques fail to provide adequate results for the images captured in uncontrolled environment. Achieving a higher classification accuracy rate for the images captured in uncontrolled environments is a major challenge being faced by researchers in this domain. There are many factors such as illumination, image orientations, noise and low-resolution, which hinder the development of facial expression recognition system in uncontrolled environment. Even the datasets prepared under the constrained environments sometimes need preprocessing before the classification stage. The core objective of this dissertation is to analyze existing techniques and develop an effective framework that is capable of classification of human facial expressions both under constrained and unconstrained environments. In this dissertation, we have explored, investigated and proposed frameworks to deal with two of the most common, influential and challenging issues that affect the accuracy of a facial expression recognition for images captured in an uncontrolled environment, namely illumination and low-resolution. First, a novel framework for feature extraction named Weber Local Binary Image Cosine Transform has been developed which not only extracts significant features by integrating features extracted using local binary pattern and weber local descriptor but also utilizes most discriminant features by applying the frequencybased components. Low-resolution and multi-orientation facial images have been used for the classification and a significant improvement in the classification accuracy rate has been achieved with the proposed framework. The developed framework has proved to be not only reliable but also computationally efficient across multiple datasets in the presence of noise and orientations. The Proposed framework has been tested on four datasets including JAFEE, MMI, CK+ and SFEW datasets. The second major contribution is the development of an illumination invariant technique. The proposed framework has been named Weber Local Binary Image Cosine Transform (WLBI-CT) and it advocates for the need of simultaneous contrast enhancement and brightness preservation for datasets containing real world images in unconstrained environment. The empirical results for the SFEW dataset are promising. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, rigorous set of experiments are presented in this thesis. The empirical results meet the standard quantitative measure criteria. The comparison of our work with various other stateof-the-art techniques is also presented using various benchmarks for these factors. The results are impressive even in the case of inclusion of noise and occlusion effects.