Hazes with various properties spread widely across flat areas with depth continuities and corner areas with depth discontinuities. Removing haze from a single hazy image is difficult due to its ill-posed nature. To solve this problem, this study proposes a modified hybrid median filter that performs a median filter to preserve the edges of flat areas and a hybrid median filter to preserve depth discontinuity corners. Recovered scene radiance, which is obtained by removing hazy particles, restores image visibility using adaptive nonlinear curves for dynamic range expansion. Using comparative studies and quantitative evaluations, this study shows that the proposed method achieves similar or better results than those of other state-of-the-art methods.

Due to an increase in multimedia content and the acceleration of digital convergence, demand for next-generation IPTV service is rapidly growing. IPTV service seamlessly provides both real-time broadcasting and content sharing services on diverse terminals through complex networks. In this paper, a secure and scalable content sharing framework is proposed for next-generation IPTV service. The proposed framework has an advantage over conventional content protection techniques in producing scalable content with transcodable, adjustable, and perceptual security features. Moreover, it ensures end-to-end security over the entire service range based on a single security mechanism. The suitability of the proposed approach is demonstrated experimentally using a practical service scenario with real-world environments. The experiments show that the proposed approach can provide several different levels of content security, from a perceptual level to an almost unintelligible level, while keeping the additional time overhead low. Consequently, it is expected that use of this security technology alone can have a practical contribution in creating new business opportunities for IPTV services.

The need for data encryption that protects sensitive data in a database has increased rapidly. However, encrypted data can no longer be efficiently queried because nearly all of the data should be decrypted. Several order-preserving encryption schemes that enable indexes to be built over encrypted data have been suggested to solve this problem. They allow any comparison operation to be directly applied to encrypted data. However, one of the main disadvantages of these schemes is that they expose sensitive data to inference attacks with order information, especially when the data are used together with unencrypted columns in the database. In this study, a new order-preserving encryption scheme that provides secure queries by hiding the order is introduced. Moreover, it provides efficient queries because any user who has the encryption key knows the order. The proposed scheme is designed to be efficient and secure in such an environment. Thus, it is possible to encrypt only sensitive data while leaving other data unencrypted. The encryption is not only robust against order exposure, but also shows high performance for any query over encrypted data. In addition, the proposed scheme provides strong updates without assumptions of the distribution of plaintext. This allows it to be integrated easily with the existing database system.