In this paper, we first briefly discuss the newly emerging Secured JPEG (JPSEC) standard for security services for JPEG 2000 compressed images. We then propose our novel approach for applying authentication to JPEG 2000 images in a scalable manner. Our authentication technique can be used for source authentication, nonrepudiation and integrity verification for the received possibly transcoded JPEG 2000 images in such a way that it is possible to authenticate different resolutions or different qualities extracted or received from a JPEG 2000 encoded image. Three different implementation methods for our authentication technique are presented. Packet-Based Authentication involves using the MD5 hashing algorithm for calculating the hash value for each individual packet in the JPEG 2000 codestream. Hash values are truncated to a specified length to reduce the overhead in storage space, concatenated into a single string, and then signed using the RSA algorithm and the author's private key for repudiation prevention. Resolution-Based Authentication and Quality-Based Authentication methods involve generating a single hash value from all contiguous packets from each entire resolution or each entire quality layer, respectively. Our algorithms maintain most of the inherent flexibility and scalability of JPEG 2000 compressed images. The resultant secured codestream is still JPEG 2000 compliant and compatible with JPEG 2000 compliant decoders. Also, our algorithms are compatible with the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for preventing signing repudiation from the sender and are implemented using the new JPSEC standard for security signaling.

The block based motion estimation technique is adopted by various video coding standards to reduce the temporal redundancy in video sequences. The core of that technique is the search algorithm implemented to find the location of the best matched block. Indeed, the full search algorithm is the most straightforward and optimal but computationally demanding search algorithm. Consequently, many fast and suboptimal search algorithms have been proposed. Reduction of the number of location being searched is the approach used to decrease the computational load of full search. In this paper, hybridization between an adaptive search algorithm and the full search algorithm is proposed. The adaptive search algorithm benefits from the correlation within spatial and temporal adjacent blocks. At the same time, a feature domain based matching criteria is used to reduce the complexity resulting from applying the pixel based conventional criteria. It is shown that the proposed algorithm produces good quality performance and requires less computational time compared with popular block matching algorithms.