Steve Ward’s research while affiliated with University of Huddersfield and other places

Security is a systematic issue which covers product design, implementation, logistic, manufacture and management. With the exponential growth of electronic business in recent years, the security of e-payment which is an important part of e-supply chain management (eSCM), becomes a critical issue. A large amount of payment in transactions is made via POS (point of sales) devices. The security of the POS system has its own specialties. However, few research papers focus on POS device security. This paper provides comprehensive investigation into security on POS devices. Firstly, it offers first-hand information on hardware and design of physical security. In particular, attacks, countermeasures and practical implementation are studied. Secondly, secure key management and security management in manufacture are investigated. Further research directions have been discussed according to the authors’ analysis.

Surface speckle pattern intensity distribution resulting from laser light scattering from a rough surface contains various information about the surface geometrical and physical properties. A surface roughness measurement technique based on the texture analysis of surface speckle pattern texture images is put forward. In the surface roughness measurement technique, the speckle pattern texture images are taken by a simple setup configuration consisting of a laser and a CCD camera. Our experimental results show that the surface roughness contained in the surface speckle pattern texture images has a good monotonic relationship with their energy feature of the gray-level co-occurrence matrices. After the measurement system is calibrated by a standard surface roughness specimen, the surface roughness of the object surface composed of the same material and machined by the same method as the standard specimen surface can be evaluated from a single speckle pattern texture image. The robustness of the characterization of speckle pattern texture for surface roughness is also discussed. Thus the surface roughness measurement technique can be used for an in-process surface measurement.

High-speed non-destructive inspection (NDI) systems using magnetic flux leakage method (MFL) is in great demand in online metal inspection and defect characterisation, especially in pipeline and rail track inspection. For MFL systems at high speed measurement, in addition to magnetic flux, eddy currents exist in metal specimen because of the relative movement between the probe and specimen. These currents alter the profile of electromagnetic field, which increases difficulty in signal interpretation and defect characterization. In this paper, eddy currents generated by high speed movement and their characterisation in high-speed MFL inspection systems were investigated by using numerical simulations. Besides, the MFL signals from high speed MFL measurement against defect depth were examined.

Changes in illumination conditions will alter the appearance of digital images that will in turn have a detrimental effect on face recognition. To overcome the problem, histogram equalisation has already been applied to grey world face recognition and extended to colour object recognition by independently processing the three colour channels. This paper furthers this work by introducing a new technique, cross-channel histogram equalisation, and reports upon its application to colour face recognition under different illumination conditions. Based on the experimental tests, our approach has been shown to outperform other efforts on histogram equalisation for normalisation. Finally we give our conclusions and discuss future work.

In traditional Point of Sales (POS) device, the legitimate user is mainly authenticated by PIN (Personal Identification Number). PIN method has drawbacks like easy to be forgotten. Fingerprint technology, as the most viable biometrics in the special and restricted hardware environment of POS device, has been used to increase user convenience. However, due to inherent problems, fingerprint alone can hardly replace PIN in many high secure applications. Although keystroke pattern as one kind of biometrics is in research for years, no real satisfied results have been got due to its inherent great variability. In this paper, we proposed an innovative method by adapting and increase keystroke pattern technology to POS device and applications. Together with fingerprint system, the adapted keystroke pattern recognition system constitute a multibiometric system, which helps achieve an increase in performance, and provide anti-spoofing measures by making it difficult for an intruder to spoof multiple biometric traits simultaneously. Since this approach is a combination of partially feature- based and partially knowledge-based, it can be a more deployable alternative to strengthen existing PIN and pure biometric authentication methods. Experimental results support that this approach can be better trade-off of the security and user convenience.

Metallic coated pipelines are widely applied to oil and gas transmission, nuclear power, chemical industry, etc, and are buried underground. Metallic coating is difficult to detect and locate defects inside the pipe by using conventional electromagnetic non-destructive evaluation techniques. Remote Field Eddy Current method is proposed and investigated in the paper. In order to unveil the location of remote field for coated pipes and the signal response to surface circumferential defect in coatings when the excitation coil scans over the defect region, numerical simulations using Finite Element Method were conducted in conjunction with optimisation of mesh in the problem area, and cooperation of commercial simulation package, FEMLAB with MATLAB. The simulation study discussed two remote fields along the pipeline respectively reflecting information on the pipe and coating when the optimal excitation frequency is employed. Signals response to surface circumferential defect in coating are acquired in the remote field locating farther away from the excitation, which benefits the effort to distinguish the defect in pipes from that in coatings.