Pranav Joshi

Amitalok J. Budkuley, Pranav Joshi, Manideep Mamindlapally et al.

Commitment is an important cryptographic primitive. It is well known that noisy channels are a promising resource to realize commitment in an information-theoretically secure manner. However, oftentimes, channel behaviour may be poorly characterized thereby limiting the commitment throughput and/or degrading the security guarantees; particularly problematic is when a dishonest party, unbeknown to the honest one, can maliciously alter the channel characteristics. Reverse elastic channels (RECs) are an interesting class of such unreliable channels, where only a dishonest committer, say, Alice can maliciously alter the channel. RECs have attracted recent interest in the study of several cryptographic primitives. Our principal contribution is the REC commitment capacity characterization; this proves a recent related conjecture. A key result is our tight converse which analyses a specific cheating strategy by Alice. RECs are closely related to the classic unfair noisy channels (UNCs); elastic channels (ECs), where only a dishonest receiver Bob can alter the channel, are similarly related. In stark contrast to UNCs, both RECs and ECs always exhibit positive commitment throughput for all non-trivial parameters. Interestingly, our results show that channels with exclusive one-sided elasticity for dishonest parties, exhibit a fundamental asymmetry where a committer with one-sided elasticity has a more debilitating effect on the commitment throughput than a receiver.

Karthik Muthuraman, Pranav Joshi, Suraj Kiran Raman

Offside detection in soccer has emerged as one of the most important decisions with an average of 50 offside decisions every game. False detections and rash calls adversely affect game conditions and in many cases drastically change the outcome of the game. The human eye has finite precision and can only discern a limited amount of detail in a given instance. Current offside decisions are made manually by sideline referees and tend to remain controversial in many games. This calls for automated offside detection techniques in order to assist accurate refereeing. In this work, we have explicitly used computer vision and image processing techniques like Hough transform, color similarity (quantization), graph connected components, and vanishing point ideas to identify the probable offside regions. Keywords: Hough transform, connected components, KLT tracking, color similarity.