Biblio
The barcode is an important link between real life and the virtual world nowadays. One of the most common barcodes is QR code, which its appearance, black and white modules, is not visually pleasing. The QR code is applied to product packaging and campaign promotion in the market. There are more and more stores using QR code for transaction payment. If the QR code is altered or illegally duplicated, it will endanger the information security of users. Therefore, the study uses infrared watermarking to embed the infrared QR code information into the explicit QR code to strengthen the anti-counterfeiting features. The explicit graphic QR code is produced by data hiding with error diffusion in this study. With the optical characteristics of K, one of the four printed ink colors CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), only K can be rendered in infrared. Hence, we use the infrared watermarking to embed the implicit QR code information into the explicit graphic QR code. General QR code reader may be used to interpret explicit graphic QR code information. As for implicit QR code, it needs the infrared detector to extract its implicit QR code information. If the QR code is illegally copied, it will not show the hidden second QR code under infrared detection. In this study, infrared watermark hidden in the graphic QR code can enhance not only the aesthetics of QR code, but also the anti-counterfeiting feature. It can also be applied to printing related fields, such as security documents, banknotes, etc. in the future.
The advancement in technology has changed how people work and what software and hardware people use. From conventional personal computer to GPU, hardware technology and capability have dramatically improved so does the operating systems that come along. Unfortunately, current industry practice to compare OS is performed with single perspective. It is either benchmark the hardware level performance or performs penetration testing to check the security features of an OS. This rigid method of benchmarking does not really reflect the true performance of an OS as the performance analysis is not comprehensive and conclusive. To illustrate this deficiency, the study performed hardware level and operational level benchmarking on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8 and the results indicate that there are instances where Windows XP excels over its newer counterparts. Overall, the research shows Windows 8 is a superior OS in comparison to its predecessors running on the same hardware. Furthermore, the findings also show that the automated benchmarking tools are proved less efficient benchmark systems that run on Windows XP and older OS as they do not support DirectX 11 and other advanced features that the hardware supports. There lies the need to have a unified benchmarking approach to compare other aspects of OS such as user oriented tasks and security parameters to provide a complete comparison. Therefore, this paper is proposing a unified approach for Operating System (OS) comparisons with the help of a Windows OS case study. This unified approach includes comparison of OS from three aspects which are; hardware level, operational level performance and security tests.