Blind Detection of Region Duplication Forgery Using Fractal Coding and Feature Matching

Digital image forgery detection is important because of its wide use in applications such as medical diagnosis, legal investigations, and entertainment. Copy–move forgery is one of the famous techniques, which is used in region duplication. Many of the existing copy–move detection algorithms cannot effectively blind detect duplicated regions that are made by powerful image manipulation software like Photoshop. In this study, a new method is proposed for blind detecting manipulations in digital images based on modified fractal coding and feature vector matching. The proposed method not only detects typical copy–move forgery, but also finds multiple copied forgery regions for images that are subjected to rotation, scaling, reflection, and a mixture of these postprocessing operations. The proposed method is robust against tampered images undergoing attacks such as Gaussian blurring, contrast scaling, and brightness adjustment. The experimental results demonstrated the validity and efficiency of the method.     

Are devaluations contractionary in emerging economies of Eastern Europe?

In most developing countries currency depreciation is said to be contractionary. This is because depreciation reduces the aggregate supply more than it increases the aggregate demand. However, emerging European economies have received no attention so far, mostly due to unavailability of data. Now that enough time-series data are available, we try to fill the gap by investigating the impact of real depreciation in effective exchange rates of Belarus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Slovak Republic on their domestic output. We find that in the short run real depreciation is expansionary in Belarus, Latvia, Poland, and Slovak Republic; contractionary in Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Russia; and has no effect in Lithuania. In almost none of the countries, the short-run effects last into the long run.

Is there J-Curve effect in the commodity trade between Korea and rest of the world?

Previous studies that investigated the short-run and long-run effects of depreciation of the Korean won on the Korean trade balance with the rest of the world have not been able to discover significant effects. Suspecting that these studies suffer from aggregation bias, we disaggregate Korean trade flows with the rest of the world by commodity and consider the response of trade balances of 148 industries to changes in the real effective exchange rate of the won. We find that in the short run the trade balance of 91 industries are affected by exchange rate changes. However, the short-run effects last into favorable long-run only in 26 industries, a unique finding that is absent from the literature.     

Economic growth and alternative deficit-reducing tax increases and expenditure cuts: A cross-sectional study

This paper assesses empirically the relative desirability of alternative deficit-reducing tax increases and expenditure cuts in terms of their individual impact on economic growth, using cross-sectional data for a sample of 21 developed countries for the period 1972–81.Property taxes are by far superior to deficit financing, and are the best choice for implementing deficit-reducing tax increases. Income taxes and domestic taxes on goods and services, which are as bad for growth as are deficits, rank second with no difference between them. Foreign trade taxes are even worse for growth than are deficits, and are the worst choice for reducing deficits.