Graph Edit Distance with Node Splitting and Merging, and Its Application to Diatom Idenfication
A new graph matching scheme based on an extended set of edit operations, which include the splitting and merging of nodes, is proposed in this paper. This scheme is useful in applications where the nodes of the considered graphs represent regions extracted by some segmentation procedure from an image. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, its application to the automatic identification of diatoms (unicellular algae) is described.

title: Automatic Identification of Diatoms Using Visual Human-Interpretable Features
abstract: In this paper we present an identification scheme for diatoms using visual human-interpretable features. Diatoms are unicellular algae found in water and other places wherever there is humidity and enough light for photosynthesis. The automatic identification of diatoms has applications in a number of areas, for example, environmental monitoring and climate research. The overall identification is performed by an ensemble of multiple decision trees following the bagging approach. The use of human-interpretable features in contrast to traditional features, such as Fourier descriptors or moment invariants, makes it possible for a human expert to verify the induced decision trees and opens up the possibility of integrating human expert knowledge into automatically derived decision trees.

title: Automatic Identification of Diatoms Using Decision Forests
abstract: A feature based identification scheme for microscopic images of diatoms is presented in this paper. Diatoms are unicellular algae found in water and other places wherever there is humidity and enough light for photo synthesis. The proposed automatic identification scheme follows a decision tree based classification approach. In this paper two different ensemble learning methods are evaluated and results are compared with those of single decision trees. As test sets two different diatom image databases are used. For each image in the databases general features like symmetry, geometric properties, moment invariants, and Fourier descriptors as well as diatom specific features like striae density and direction are computed.

title: Identification of Diatoms by Grid Graph Matching
abstract: Diatoms are unicellular algae found in water and other places wherever there is humidity and enough light for photo synthesis. In this paper a graph matching based identification approach for the retrieval of diatoms from an image database is presented. The retrieval is based on the matching of labeled grid graphs carrying texture information of the underlying diatom. A grid graph is a regular, rectangular arrangement of nodes overlaid on an image. Each node of the graph is labeled with texture features describing a rectangular sub-region of the object. Properties of gray level co-occurrence matrices as well as of Gabor wavelets are used as texture features. The method has been evaluated on a diatom database holding images of 188 different diatoms belonging to 38 classes. For the identification of these diatoms recognition rates of more than 90 percent were obtained.

title: COSIMA- your smart, speaking E-salesperson
abstract: We present a new cooperative user interface for e-shopping. COSIMA is an intelligent Internet avatar with dynamic voice output that assists customers through their e-shopping tours and advises them like a real salesperson. COSIMA uses a meta search engine based on Preference SQL, computing best matching results to the customer's wishes. COSIMA can qualify these results and generates proper voice output. Our presentation shows COSIMA in action for comparison shopping.

title: Algebraic Immunity of S-Boxes and Augmented Functions
abstract: In this paper, the algebraic immunity of S-boxes and augmented functions of stream ciphers is investigated. Augmented functions are shown to have some algebraic properties that are not covered by previous measures of immunity. As a result, efficient algebraic attacks with very low data complexity on certain filter generators become possible. In a similar line, the algebraic immunity of the augmented function of the eSTREAM candidate Trivium is experimentally tested. These tests suggest that Trivium has some immunity against algebraic attacks on augmented functions.

title: New Features of Latin Dances: Analysis of Salsa, ChaCha, and Rumba
abstract: The stream cipher Salsa20 was introduced by Bernstein in 2005 as a candidate in the eSTREAM project, accompanied by the reduced versions Salsa20/8 and Salsa20/12. ChaCha is a variant of Salsa20 aiming at bringing better diffusion for similar performance. Variants of Salsa20 with up to 7 rounds (instead of 20) have been broken by differential cryptanalysis, while ChaCha has not been analyzed yet. We introduce a novel method for differential cryptanalysis of Salsa20 and ChaCha, inspired by correlation attacks and related to the notion of neutral bits. This is the first application of neutral bits in stream cipher cryptanalysis. It allows us to break the 256-bit version of Salsa20/8, to bring faster attacks on the 7-round variant, and to break 6- and 7-round ChaCha. In a second part, we analyze the compression function Rumba, built as the XOR of four Salsa20 instances and returning a 512-bit output. We find collision and preimage attacks for two simplified variants, then we discuss differential attacks on the original version, and exploit a high-probability differential to reduce complexity of collision search from 2256to 279for 3-round Rumba. To prove the correctness of our approach we provide examples of collisions and near-collisions on simplified versions.

title: Face Authentication Using Morphological Dynamic Link Architecture
abstract: A very attractive approach for face detection is based on multiresolution images (also known as mosaic images). Motivated by the simplicity of this approach, a rule-based face detection algorithm in frontal views is developed first. Second, a novel dynamic link architecture based on multiscale morphological dilation-erosion is proposed for face authentication. More specifically, a sparse grid is placed over the outcome of face detection stage for each person in a reference set. Subsequently, multiscale morphological operations are employed to yield a feature vector at each node of the grid and dynamic link matching is applied to verify the identity of each person from a test set. The first experimental results reported in this paper verify the superiority of the proposed method over the (standard) dynamic link matching that is based on Gabor wavelets.

title: Optimizing the catalog search process for e-procurement platforms
abstract: Many e-procurement platforms support XML-based e-catalogs combined with standardized feature descriptions. Beyond the usual keyword search this opens the arena for attribute-based search engines, including parametric search and preference search. We analyze the impact of different search techniques for such e-catalogs on the overall search process costs. It turns out that preference search has a high potential to significantly reduce the process costs. A large-scale use case with the MAN2B e-procurement platform supports our claim. We identify improvements achievable by using preference search, in particular less navigation steps during the product search and better search results due to the BMO query model. Expensive cases, where frustrated users accept bad search results or phone up the company's purchasing department, should decrease significantly. This in turn will enable the purchasing department to focus more on strategic issues like supplier relationship management than on operative issues as it still happens widely today.