Image phylogeny tree construction based on local inheritance relationship correction

Abstract

With the popularization of image editing software and social networks, digital images can be easily downloaded, re-edited and re-distributed on the Internet, which brings a large amount of near-duplicate images (NDIs) whose content are slightly different. The underlying transformation history within a group of NDIs is a powerful tool to determine both the image originality and authenticity. Recent works have focus on the construction of image phylogeny tree (IPT), i.e., a directed acyclic graph to describe the genealogical relationship within NDIs. State-of-the-art approaches for IPT construction share a common two-step pipeline: i) dissimilarity matrix estimation with a dissimilarity function; and ii) tree structure construction with a tree-building algorithm. Many approaches addressed on dissimilarity matrix estimation as the accuracy of the tree-building algorithms are significantly impaired by this step. Different from these methods, in this paper, instead of proposing a novel dissimilarity matrix estimation method, we design an IPT construction framework based on local inheritance relationship correction. The motivation among our proposed framework is that the negative influence of an inaccurate dissimilarity matrix can be suppressed by a subsequent correction. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed approach can achieve better performance for IPT construction under various challenging scenarios when compared with the state-of-the-art IPT construction algorithms.