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This paper uses a range of different methodologies to estimate the equilibrium real exchange rate in Armenia with both single-country and panel estimation techniques. We estimate a country specific autoregressive distributed lag model and then proceed with the estimation of a cointegrated panel consisting of transition economies in Europe and Central Asia. This addresses cross section dependence by using common correlated effects estimators. While our analysis focuses on Armenia, the methods are applicable to a large number of transition economies, and the paper thus provides an overview of methods that can be used to assess a country’s equilibrium exchange rate.

A robust software watermarking scheme under which the watermark can resist against various attacks includ-ing collusion attacks is proposed based on obfuscated interpretation. The obfuscated interpretation technique can not only hide the functionality of a given program, but also provide an alternative simple way to modify the code. Thus in the proposed scheme translation rules defined in obfuscated interpretation are used for code substitution, and a water-mark encoded by error-correcting coding is embedded during the translation procedure of obfuscated interpretation. A series of experimental results show that the proposed watermark can resist against automatic attacks that modify the program code. Moreover due to the randomness introduced in the program translation, the watermark is robust to collusion attacks as well.

In order to synthetically utilize the multi-steganalysis algorithms, and ulteriorly enhance the detection accuracy, the United-Judgment methods based on parameter-estimation were proposed for image steganalysis. According to two types of universal blind detection and specific steganalysis, a United-Judgment method based on weight and threshold, and also a method based on segment were proposed in this paper. Experiments were both made for the former method with seven kinds of typical blind detection algorithms and the latter one with five kinds of typical spatial domain steganalysis algorithms, respectively. The results showed that the proposed methods can synthetically utilize the existing detection algorithms, and comparing the results with a separate use of only one algorithm, the proposed methods could achieve higher detection accuracy.

In this study, the spatial distributions of soil lead (Pb) concentration in three horizontal soils in Guangdong, China, were surveyed and analyzed using geostatistics and geography information systems (GIS). Findings indicated that the Pb geometric mean concentration of 23.3 mg/kg in surface soils was found to be higher than those in global soils, which ranged from 2.3-235 mg/kg. In addition, the Pb geometric mean concentrations from A- to C-horizon were found to be 23.3, 27.2, and 28.6 mg/kg, respectively. The classification of a soil Pb environmental risk in an area was likewise presented based on the different levels of environmental quality of Pb and was done by GIS technology. Accordingly, there is a higher local concentration of Pb in the surrounding areas of Guangzhou where there is higher population density and in the north of Guangdong, which is a historic mining area. The results obtained by the environmental risk assessment reveal that about 46% of total surveyed area was above the background value, that is, 2.7% of the total area was at risk of pollution.

This paper discusses the LTSB (Least Two Significant Bits) steganalysis technique, and presents a detection method based on quartic equation (QEM). This method constructs a finite-state machine based on image pixel sample pairs, and then builds a quartic equation via those states conversion relation. Finally, solves the equation and obtains the embedding ratio estimated value. Experimental results show that this approach can estimate the length of embedded message and make a reliable decision whether the image is a steg-image or not.