Federated learning combined with blockchain empowers secure data sharing in autonomous driving applications. Nevertheless, with the increasing granularity and complexity of vehicle-generated data, the lack of data quality audits raises concerns about multi-party mistrust in trajectory prediction tasks. In response, this paper proposes an asynchronous federated learning data sharing method based on an interpretable reputation quantization mechanism utilizing graph neural network tools. Data providers share data structures under differential privacy constraints to ensure security while reducing redundant data. We implement deep reinforcement learning to categorize vehicles by reputation level, which optimizes the aggregation efficiency of federated learning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed data sharing scheme not only reinforces the security of the trajectory prediction task but also enhances prediction accuracy.
Jun 17, 2024·Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE 35th International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), 24-26 July 2024, pp. 135-142
Zhuoheng Ran, Muhammad A. A. Abdelgawad, Zekai Zhang, Ray C. C. Cheung · 5 authors
The dramatic surge in the utilisation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) underscores the need for a secure and efficient mechanism to responsibly manage, use and disseminate multi-dimensional data generated by artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based copyright traceability framework called ring oscillator-singular value decomposition (RO-SVD), which introduces decomposition computing to approximate low-rank matrices generated from hardware entropy sources and establishes an AI-generated content (AIGC) copyright traceability mechanism at the device level. By leveraging the parallelism and reconfigurability of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), our framework can be easily constructed on existing AI-accelerated devices and provide a low-cost solution to emerging copyright issues of AIGC. We developed a hardware-software (HW/SW) co-design prototype based on comprehensive analysis and on-board experiments with multiple AI-applicable FPGAs. Using AI-generated images as a case study, our framework demonstrated effectiveness and emphasised customisation, unpredictability, efficiency, management and reconfigurability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical hardware study discussing and implementing copyright traceability specifically for AI-generated content.
Deep Learning is advancing medical imaging Research and Development (R&D), leading to the frequent clinical use of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML)-based medical devices. However, to advance AI R&D, two challenges arise: 1) significant data imbalance, with most data from Europe/America and under 10% from Asia, despite its 60% global population share; and 2) hefty time and investment needed to curate proprietary datasets for commercial use. In response, we established the first commercial medical imaging platform, encompassing steps like: 1) data collection, 2) data selection, 3) annotation, and 4) pre-processing. Moreover, we focus on harnessing under-represented data from Japan and broader Asia, including Computed Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and Whole Slide Imaging scans. Using the collected data, we are preparing/providing ready-to-use datasets for medical AI R&D by 1) offering these datasets to AI firms, biopharma, and medical device makers and 2) using them as training/test data to develop tailored AI solutions for such entities. We also aim to merge Blockchain for data security and plan to synthesize rare disease data via generative AI. DataHub Website: https://medical-datahub.ai/
Unlearning in Federated Learning (FL) presents significant challenges, as models grow and evolve with complex inheritance relationships. This complexity is amplified when blockchain is employed to ensure the integrity and traceability of FL, where the need to edit multiple interlinked blockchain records and update all inherited models complicates the process.In this paper, we introduce Blockchained Federated Unlearning (BlockFUL), a novel framework with a dual-chain structure comprising a live chain and an archive chain for enabling unlearning capabilities within Blockchained FL. BlockFUL introduces two new unlearning paradigms, i.e., parallel and sequential paradigms, which can be effectively implemented through gradient-ascent-based and re-training-based unlearning methods. These methods enhance the unlearning process across multiple inherited models by enabling efficient consensus operations and reducing computational costs. Our extensive experiments validate that these methods effectively reduce data dependency and operational overhead, thereby boosting the overall performance of unlearning inherited models within BlockFUL on CIFAR-10 and Fashion-MNIST datasets using AlexNet, ResNet18, and MobileNetV2 models.
Yilin Ye, Qian Zhu, Shishi Xiao, Kang Zhang · 5 authors
Image search is an essential and user-friendly method to explore vast galleries of digital images. However, existing image search methods heavily rely on proximity measurements like tag matching or image similarity, requiring precise user inputs for satisfactory results. To meet the growing demand for a contemporary image search engine that enables accurate comprehension of users' search intentions, we introduce an innovative user intent expansion framework. Our framework leverages visual-language models to parse and compose multi-modal user inputs to provide more accurate and satisfying results. It comprises two-stage processes: 1) a parsing stage that incorporates a language parsing module with large language models to enhance the comprehension of textual inputs, along with a visual parsing module that integrates an interactive segmentation module to swiftly identify detailed visual elements within images; and 2) a logic composition stage that combines multiple user search intents into a unified logic expression for more sophisticated operations in complex searching scenarios. Moreover, the intent expansion framework enables users to perform flexible contextualized interactions with the search results to further specify or adjust their detailed search intents iteratively. We implemented the framework into an image search system for NFT (non-fungible token) search and conducted a user study to evaluate its usability and novel properties. The results indicate that the proposed framework significantly improves users' image search experience. Particularly the parsing and contextualized interactions prove useful in allowing users to express their search intents more accurately and engage in a more enjoyable iterative search experience.
Visual homing is a lightweight approach to visual navigation. Given the stored information of an initial 'home' location, the navigation task back to this location is achieved from any other location by comparing the stored home information to the current image and extracting a motion vector. A challenge that constrains the applicability of visual homing is that the home location must be within the robot's field of view to initiate the homing process. Thus, we propose a blockchain approach to visual navigation for a heterogeneous robot team over a wide area of visual navigation. Because it does not require map data structures, the approach is useful for robot platforms with a small computational footprint, and because it leverages current visual information, it supports a resilient and adaptive path selection. Further, we present a lightweight Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism for reaching consensus in the untrustworthy visual homing network.
Computer Vision (CV) is playing a significant role in transforming society by utilizing machine learning (ML) tools for a wide range of tasks. However, the need for large-scale datasets to train ML models creates challenges for centralized ML algorithms. The massive computation loads required for processing and the potential privacy risks associated with storing and processing data on central cloud servers put these algorithms under severe strain. To address these issues, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution, allowing privacy preservation by training models locally and exchanging them to improve overall performance. Additionally, the computational load is distributed across multiple clients, reducing the burden on central servers. This paper presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first review discussing recent advancements of FL in CV applications, comparing them to conventional centralized training paradigms. It provides an overview of current FL applications in various CV tasks, emphasizing the advantages of FL and the challenges of implementing it in CV. To facilitate this, the paper proposes a taxonomy of FL techniques in CV, outlining their applications and security threats. It also discusses privacy concerns related to implementing blockchain in FL schemes for CV tasks and summarizes existing privacy preservation methods. Moving on, the paper identifies open research challenges and potential future research directions to further exploit the potential of FL and blockchain in CV applications.
Petar Radanliev, David De Roure, Peter Novitzky, Ivo Sluganovic
Despite the proliferation of Blockchain Metaverse projects, the inclusion of physically disabled individuals in the Metaverse remains distant, with limited standards and regulations in place. However, the article proposes a concept of the Metaverse that leverages emerging technologies, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality, and the Internet of Things, to enable greater engagement of disabled creatives. This approach aims to enhance inclusiveness in the Metaverse landscape. Based on the findings, the paper concludes that the active involvement of physically disabled individuals in the design and development of Metaverse platforms is crucial for promoting inclusivity. The proposed framework for accessibility and inclusiveness in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed realities of decentralised Metaverses provides a basis for the meaningful participation of disabled creatives. The article emphasises the importance of addressing the mechanisms for art production by individuals with disabilities in the emerging Metaverse landscape. Additionally, it highlights the need for further research and collaboration to establish standards and regulations that facilitate the inclusion of physically disabled individuals in Metaverse projects.
Training and deploying the large language models requires a large mount of computational resource because the language models contain billions of parameters and the text has thousands of tokens. Another problem is that the large language models are static. They are fixed after the training process. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose to train and deploy the dynamic large language model on blockchains, which have high computation performance and are distributed across a network of computers. A blockchain is a secure, decentralized, and transparent system that allows for the creation of a tamper-proof ledger for transactions without the need for intermediaries. The dynamic large language models can continuously learn from the user input after the training process. Our method provides a new way to develop the large language models and also sheds a light on the next generation artificial intelligence systems.
We study the task of generating profitable Non-Fungible Token (NFT) images from user-input texts. Recent advances in diffusion models have shown great potential for image generation. However, existing works can fall short in generating visually-pleasing and highly-profitable NFT images, mainly due to the lack of 1) plentiful and fine-grained visual attribute prompts for an NFT image, and 2) effective optimization metrics for generating high-quality NFT images. To solve these challenges, we propose a Diffusion based generation framework with Multiple Visual-Policies as rewards (i.e., Diffusion-MVP) for NFT images. The proposed framework consists of a large language model (LLM), a diffusion-based image generator, and a series of visual rewards by design. First, the LLM enhances a basic human input (such as "panda") by generating more comprehensive NFT-style prompts that include specific visual attributes, such as "panda with Ninja style and green background." Second, the diffusion-based image generator is fine-tuned using a large-scale NFT dataset to capture fine-grained image styles and accessory compositions of popular NFT elements. Third, we further propose to utilize multiple visual-policies as optimization goals, including visual rarity levels, visual aesthetic scores, and CLIP-based text-image relevances. This design ensures that our proposed Diffusion-MVP is capable of minting NFT images with high visual quality and market value. To facilitate this research, we have collected the largest publicly available NFT image dataset to date, consisting of 1.5 million high-quality images with corresponding texts and market values. Extensive experiments including objective evaluations and user studies demonstrate that our framework can generate NFT images showing more visually engaging elements and higher market value, compared with state-of-the-art approaches.
Open access
3 source records
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of a novel method called linear law-based feature space transformation (LLT) on the accuracy of intraday price movement prediction of cryptocurrencies. To do this, the 1-minute interval price data of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance Coin, and Ripple between 1 January 2019 and 22 October 2022 were collected from the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. Then, 14-hour nonoverlapping time windows were applied to sample the price data. The classification was based on the first 12 hours, and the two classes were determined based on whether the closing price rose or fell after the next 2 hours. These price data were first transformed with the LLT, then they were classified by traditional machine learning algorithms with 10-fold cross-validation. Based on the results, LLT greatly increased the accuracy for all cryptocurrencies, which emphasizes the potential of the LLT algorithm in predicting price movements.
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution.
Kar Balan, Shruti Agarwal, Simon Jenni, Andy Parsons · 6 authors
We present EKILA; a decentralized framework that enables creatives to receive recognition and reward for their contributions to generative AI (GenAI). EKILA proposes a robust visual attribution technique and combines this with an emerging content provenance standard (C2PA) to address the problem of synthetic image provenance -- determining the generative model and training data responsible for an AI-generated image. Furthermore, EKILA extends the non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem to introduce a tokenized representation for rights, enabling a triangular relationship between the asset's Ownership, Rights, and Attribution (ORA). Leveraging the ORA relationship enables creators to express agency over training consent and, through our attribution model, to receive apportioned credit, including royalty payments for the use of their assets in GenAI.
Open access
3 source records
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a data unit stored on the blockchain. Nowadays, more and more investors and collectors (NFT traders), who participate in transactions of NFTs, have an urgent need to assess the performance of NFTs. However, there are two challenges for NFT traders when analyzing the performance of NFT. First, the current rarity models have flaws and are sometimes not convincing. In addition, NFT performance is dependent on multiple factors, such as images (high-dimensional data), history transactions (network), and market evolution (time series). It is difficult to take comprehensive consideration and analyze NFT performance efficiently. To address these challenges, we propose NFTVis, a visual analysis system that facilitates assessing individual NFT performance. A new NFT rarity model is proposed to quantify NFTs with images. Four well-coordinated views are designed to represent the various factors affecting the performance of the NFT. Finally, we evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of our system using two case studies and user studies.
The fervor for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) attracted countless creators, leading to a Big Bang of digital assets driven by latent or explicit forms of inspiration, as in many creative processes. This work exploits Vision Transformers and graph-based modeling to delve into visual inspiration phenomena between NFTs over the years, i.e., the visual influence that can be detected whenever an NFT appears to be visually close to another that was published earlier in the market. Our goals include unveiling the main structural traits that shape visual inspiration networks, exploring the interrelation between visual inspiration and asset performances, investigating crypto influence on inspiration processes, and explaining the inspiration relationships among NFTs. Our findings unveil how the pervasiveness of inspiration led to a temporary saturation of the visual feature space, the impact of the dichotomy between inspiring and inspired NFTs on their financial performance, and an intrinsic self-regulatory mechanism between markets and inspiration waves. Our work can serve as a starting point for gaining a broader view of the evolution of Web3.
Biometric recognition as an efficient and hard-to-forge way of identification and verification has become an indispensable part of the current digital world. The fast evolution of this technology has been a strong incentive for integration into many applications. Meanwhile, blockchain, the decentralized ledger technology, has been widely received by both research and industry in the past few years, and it is being increasingly deployed today in many different applications, such as money transfer, IoT, healthcare, or logistics. Recently, researchers have started to speculate on the pros and cons and what the best applications would be when these two technologies cross paths. This paper provides a survey of the research literature on the combination of blockchain and biometrics and includes a first legal analysis of this integration based on GDPR to shed light on challenges and potentials. Although the integration of blockchain technology into the biometric sector is still in its infancy, with a growing body of literature discussing specific applications and advanced technological setups, this paper aims to provide a holistic understanding of blockchain applicability in biometrics. Based on published studies, this article discusses, among others, practical examples combining blockchain and biometrics for novel applications in PKI systems, distributed trusted services, and identity management. Challenges and limitations when combining blockchain and biometrics that motivate future work will also be discussed; e.g., blockchain networks at their current stage may not be efficient or economical for some real-time biometric applications. Finally, we also discuss key legal aspects of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) related to this combination of technologies (blockchain and biometrics); for example, accountability, immutability, anonymity, and data protection elements.
With the growing popularity of smartphone photography in recent years, web photos play an increasingly important role in all walks of life. Source camera identification of web photos aims to establish a reliable linkage from the captured images to their source cameras, and has a broad range of applications, such as image copyright protection, user authentication, investigated evidence verification, etc. This paper presents an innovative and practical source identification framework that employs neural-network enhanced sensor pattern noise to trace back web photos efficiently while ensuring security. Our proposed framework consists of three main stages: initial device fingerprint registration, fingerprint extraction and cryptographic connection establishment while taking photos, and connection verification between photos and source devices. By incorporating metric learning and frequency consistency into the deep network design, our proposed fingerprint extraction algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance on modern smartphone photos for reliable source identification. Meanwhile, we also propose several optimization sub-modules to prevent fingerprint leakage and improve accuracy and efficiency. Finally for practical system design, two cryptographic schemes are introduced to reliably identify the correlation between registered fingerprint and verified photo fingerprint, i.e. fuzzy extractor and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). The codes for fingerprint extraction network and benchmark dataset with modern smartphone cameras photos are all publicly available at https://github.com/PhotoNecf/PhotoNecf 1.
Open access
3 source records
cs.CV
Digital Media Forensic Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) represent deeds of ownership, based on blockchain technologies and smart contracts, of unique crypto assets on digital art forms (e.g., artworks or collectibles). In the spotlight after skyrocketing in 2021, NFTs have attracted the attention of crypto enthusiasts and investors intent on placing promising investments in this profitable market. However, the NFT financial performance prediction has not been widely explored to date. In this work, we address the above problem based on the hypothesis that NFT images and their textual descriptions are essential proxies to predict the NFT selling prices. To this purpose, we propose MERLIN, a novel multimodal deep learning framework designed to train Transformer-based language and visual models, along with graph neural network models, on collections of NFTs' images and texts. A key aspect in MERLIN is its independence on financial features, as it exploits only the primary data a user interested in NFT trading would like to deal with, i.e., NFT images and textual descriptions. By learning dense representations of such data, a price-category classification task is performed by MERLIN models, which can also be tuned according to user preferences in the inference phase to mimic different risk-return investment profiles. Experimental evaluation on a publicly available dataset has shown that MERLIN models achieve significant performances according to several financial assessment criteria, fostering profitable investments, and also beating baseline machine-learning classifiers based on financial features.
M. Ramalingam, G. Chemmalar Selvi, Nancy Victor, Rajeswari Chengoden · 11 authors
Blockchain (BC) and Computer Vision (CV) are the two emerging fields with the potential to transform various sectors.The ability of BC can help in offering decentralized and secure data storage, while CV allows machines to learn and understand visual data. This integration of the two technologies holds massive promise for developing innovative applications that can provide solutions to the challenges in various sectors such as supply chain management, healthcare, smart cities, and defense. This review explores a comprehensive analysis of the integration of BC and CV by examining their combination and potential applications. It also provides a detailed analysis of the fundamental concepts of both technologies, highlighting their strengths and limitations. This paper also explores current research efforts that make use of the benefits offered by this combination. The effort includes how BC can be used as an added layer of security in CV systems and also ensure data integrity, enabling decentralized image and video analytics using BC. The challenges and open issues associated with this integration are also identified, and appropriate potential future directions are also proposed.
Digital wallet as a software program or a digital device allows users to conduct various transactions. Hot and cold digital wallets are considered as two types of this wallet. Digital wallets need an online connection fall into the first group, whereas digital wallets can operate without internet connection belong to the second group. Prior to buying a digital wallet, it is important to define for what purpose it will be utilized. The ease with which a mobile phone transaction may be completed in a couple of seconds and the speed with which transactions are executed are reflection of efficiency. One of the most important elements of digital wallets is data organization. Digital wallets are significantly less expensive than classic methods of transaction, which entails various charges and fees. Constantly, demand for their usage is growing due to speed, security, and the ability to conduct transactions between two users without the need of a third party. As the popularity of digital currency wallets grows, the number of security concerns impacting them increases significantly. The current status of digital wallets on the market, as well as the options for an efficient solution for obtaining and utilizing digital wallets. Finally, the digital wallets' security and future improvement prospects are discussed in this chapter.
Recent developments in machine learning have shown that successful models do not rely only on huge amounts of data but the right kind of data. We show in this paper how this data-centric approach can be facilitated in a decentralized manner to enable efficient data collection for algorithms. Face detectors are a class of models that suffer heavily from bias issues as they have to work on a large variety of different data. We also propose a face detection and anonymization approach using a hybrid MultiTask Cascaded CNN with FaceNet Embeddings to benchmark multiple datasets to describe and evaluate the bias in the models towards different ethnicities, gender, and age groups along with ways to enrich fairness in a decentralized system of data labeling, correction, and verification by users to create a robust pipeline for model retraining.
Art is an artistic method of using digital technologies as a part of the generative or creative process. With the advent of digital currency and NFTs (Non-Fungible Token), the demand for digital art is growing aggressively. In this manuscript, we advocate the concept of using deep generative networks with adversarial training for a stable and variant art generation. The work mainly focuses on using the Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DC-GAN) and explores the techniques to address the common pitfalls in GAN training. We compare various architectures and designs of DC-GANs to arrive at a recommendable design choice for a stable and realistic generation. The main focus of the work is to generate realistic images that do not exist in reality but are synthesised from random noise by the proposed model. We provide visual results of generated animal face images (some pieces of evidence showing a blend of species) along with recommendations for training, architecture and design choices. We also show how training image preprocessing plays a massive role in GAN training.
Open access
2 source records
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Rajesh Kumar, Abdullah Aman Khan, Zhang, Sinmin, Jay Kumar · 10 authors
With the increase of COVID-19 cases worldwide, an effective way is required to diagnose COVID-19 patients. The primary problem in diagnosing COVID-19 patients is the shortage and reliability of testing kits, due to the quick spread of the virus, medical practitioners are facing difficulty in identifying the positive cases. The second real-world problem is to share the data among the hospitals globally while keeping in view the privacy concerns of the organizations. Building a collaborative model and preserving privacy are the major concerns for training a global deep learning model. This paper proposes a framework that collects a small amount of data from different sources (various hospitals) and trains a global deep learning model using blockchain-based federated learning. Blockchain technology authenticates the data and federated learning trains the model globally while preserving the privacy of the organization. First, we propose a data normalization technique that deals with the heterogeneity of data as the data is gathered from different hospitals having different kinds of Computed Tomography (CT) scanners. Secondly, we use Capsule Network-based segmentation and classification to detect COVID-19 patients. Thirdly, we design a method that can collaboratively train a global model using blockchain technology with federated learning while preserving privacy. Additionally, we collected real-life COVID-19 patients' data open to the research community. The proposed framework can utilize up-to-date data which improves the recognition of CT images. Finally, we conducted comprehensive experiments to validate the proposed method. Our results demonstrate better performance for detecting COVID-19 patients.
Open access
3 source records
COVID-19 diagnosis using AI
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Blockchain is a relatively new technology that can be seen as a decentralised database. Blockchain systems heavily rely on cryptographic hash functions to store their data, which makes it difficult to tamper with any data stored in the system. A topic that was researched along with blockchain is image authentication. Image authentication focuses on investigating and maintaining the integrity of images. As a blockchain system can be useful for maintaining data integrity, image authentication has the potential to be enhanced by blockchain. There are many techniques that can be used to authenticate images; the technique investigated by this work is image hashing. Image hashing is a technique used to calculate how similar two different images are. This is done by converting the images into hashes and then comparing them using a distance formula. To investigate the topic, an experiment involving a simulated blockchain was created. The blockchain acted as a database for images. This blockchain was made up of devices which contained their own unique image hashing algorithms. The blockchain was tested by creating modified copies of the images contained in the database, and then submitting them to the blockchain to see if it will return the original image. Through this experiment it was discovered that it is plausible to create an image authentication system using blockchain and image hashing. However, the design proposed by this work requires refinement, as it appears to struggle in some situations. This work shows that blockchain can be a suitable approach for authenticating images, particularly via image hashing. Other observations include that using multiple image hash algorithms at the same time can increase performance in some cases, as well as that each type of test done to the blockchain has its own unique pattern to its data.