Robust and secure perceptual image hashing in the transform domain

Prungsinchai, Supakorn (2014) Robust and secure perceptual image hashing in the transform domain. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

The rapid development of multimedia devices such as computers, network technologies, and cell phones have made it easier for users to create, broadcast, convey, share, store, and distribute multimedia data including images, videos and audio files on a daily basis. However, the availability of image processing software in the public domain has facilitated illegal copying and distribution of digital images with unnoticeable quality changes. Thus, security and identification of media content has become an important and demanding area for research. Perceptual hashing is one of the recent technologies used for multimedia content security. A perceptual image hash function is a hash function that is robust against content-preserving operations (CPOs), such as noise, JPEG lossy compression and rotation.

This aim of this research is to study and investigate existing techniques and then contribute to the development of new perceptual image hashing techniques in the transform domain for image identification and copy detection applications. The design requirements for any perceptual image hashing system are robustness, discriminative capability (uniqueness), and unpredictability (security). The feature extraction stage plays a key role in ensuring the system output is robust and discriminative. This thesis mainly focuses on the robust feature extraction stage and the analysis of the proposed system's security. The following contributions have been made: A new perceptual hashing technique using pseudo-random sub-images in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain for extracting features has been developed. The idea employs a recent dimension reduction technique, referred to as non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) in the literature, for enhancing the robustness and security of the hash. This approach is proposed to select the most stable coefficients under various content-preserving operations, compact. The robust image hashes are generated by applies DWT and NMF into image. The proposed sub-images-DWT technique has been shown to yield good performance under image processing operations, but it still suffers from geometric attacks.

A new rotation-invariant FMT-based hashing technique incorporating the Fourier-Mellin transform and using overlapping blocks to improve the robustness against rotation attacks has also been proposed. The robust FMT-based image hashing is proposed to improve its performances under rotation, translation attacks and achieve better overall robustness. The invariance property to rotation, scaling and translation of FMT makes it more suitable for image hashing. Based on our experimental results, it has been shown that the proposed FMT-based image hashing technique is robust to a large class of image processing operations and geometric attacks.

A new robust and secure DCT overlapping block-based hashing technique incorporating the discrete cosine transforms (DCT) to combat image processing attacks has been investigated. An improved DCT sign-based hashing technique robust against image processing attacks and well as small geometric manipulations developed. From the experimental results, it was observed that the low frequency coefficients for DCT sign based-image hashing were robust to a large of content-preserving operations (CPOs). The main idea was to exploit the energy compaction property of the DCT and its ability to carry information of edges and texture in DCT sign values. From the experimental results, it was observed that the low frequency coefficients for DCT sign-based image hashing were robust to a large class of content-preserving operations (CPOs). The main idea was to exploit the energy compaction property of the DCT and its ability to carry information of edges and texture in DCT sign values. Finally, the security of the proposed image hashing systems are discussed and analysed in the light of the corresponding design requirement. The DCT sign-based image hashing scheme has hash also been shown to be the most secure technique compared to other techniques proposed in this research as it offers the highest rate of bit independence in a hash.

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