Image quality assessment (IQA) plays an important role in quality monitoring, evaluation and optimization for image processing systems. However, current quality-aware feature extraction methods for IQA can hardly balance accuracy and complexity. This paper introduces multi-order local description into image quality assessment for feature extraction. The first-order structure derivative and high-order discriminative information are integrated into local pattern representation to serve as the quality-aware features. Then joint distributions of the local pattern representation are modeled by spatially enhanced histogram. Finally, the image quality degradation is estimated by quantifying the divergence between such distributions of the reference image and those of the distorted image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in consideration of not only accuracy that is consistent with human subjective evaluation, but also robustness and stability across different distortion types and various public databases. It provides a promising choice for image quality assessment development.

With the development of Internet technology, the demand for signing electronic contracts has been greatly increased. The electronic contract generated by the participants in an online way enjoys the same legal effect as paper contract. The fairness is the key issue in jointly signing electronic contracts by the involved participants, so that all participants can either get the same copy of the contract or nothing. Most existing solutions only focus on the fairness of electronic contract generation between two participants, where the digital signature can effectively guarantee the fairness of the exchange of electronic contracts and becomes the conventional technology in designing the contract signing protocol. In this paper, an efficient blockchain-based multi-party electronic contract signing (MECS) protocol is presented, which not only offers the fairness of electronic contract generation for multiple participants, but also allows each participant to aggregate validate the signed copy of others. Security analysis shows that the proposed MECS protocol enjoys unforgeability, non-repudiation and fairness of electronic contracts, and performance analysis demonstrates the high efficiency of our construction.

When trying to estimate time-varying multipath channels by applying a basis expansion model (BEM) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, pilot clusters are contaminated by inter-carrier interference (ICI). The pilot cluster ICI (PC-ICI) degrades the estimation accuracy of BEM coefficients, which degrades system performance. In this paper, a PC-ICI suppression scheme is proposed, in which two coded symbols defined as weighted sums of data symbols are inserted on both sides of each pilot cluster. Under the assumption that the channel has Flat Doppler spectrum, the optimized weight coefficients are obtained by an alternating iterative optimization algorithm, so that the sum of the PC-ICI generated by the encoded symbols and the data symbols is minimized. By approximating the optimized weight coefficients, they are independent of the channel tap power. Furthermore, it is verified that the proposed scheme is robust to the estimation error of the normalized Doppler frequency offset and can be applied to channels with other types of Doppler spectra. Numerical simulation results show that, compared with the conventional schemes, the proposed scheme achieves significant improvements in the performance of PC-ICI suppression, channel estimation and system bit-error-ratio (BER).

Visual quality evaluation is crucially important for various video and image processing systems. Traditionally, subjective image quality assessment (IQA) given by the judgments of people can be perfectly consistent with human visual system (HVS). However, subjective IQA metrics are cumbersome and easily affected by experimental environment. These problems further limits its applications of evaluating massive pictures. Therefore, objective IQA metrics are desired which can be incorporated into machines and automatically evaluate image quality. Effective objective IQA methods should predict accurate quality in accord with the subjective evaluation. Motivated by observations that HVS is highly adapted to extract irregularity information of textures in a scene, we introduce multifractal formalism into an image quality assessment scheme in this paper. Based on multifractal analysis, statistical complexity features of nature images are extracted robustly. Then a novel framework for image quality assessment is further proposed by quantifying the discrepancies between multifractal spectrums of images. A total of 982 images are used to validate the proposed algorithm, including five type of distortions: JPEG2000 compression, JPEG compression, white noise, Gaussian blur, and Fast Fading. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metric is highly effective for evaluating perceived image quality and it outperforms many state-of-the-art methods.