Recent development of perceptual image hashing

Abstract

The easy generation, storage, transmission and reproduction of digital images have caused serious abuse and security problems. Assurance of the rightful ownership, integrity, and authenticity is a major concern to the academia as well as the industry. On the other hand, efficient search of the huge amount of images has become a great challenge. Image hashing is a technique suitable for use in image authentication and content based image retrieval (CBIR). In this article, we review some representative image hashing techniques proposed in the recent years, with emphases on how to meet the conflicting requirements of perceptual robustness and security. Following a brief introduction to some earlier methods, we focus on a typical two-stage structure and some geometric-distortion resilient techniques. We then introduce two image hashing approaches developed in our own research, and reveal security problems in some existing methods due to the absence of secret keys in certain stage of the image feature extraction, or availability of a large quantity of images, keys, or the hash function to the adversary. More research efforts are needed in developing truly robust and secure image hashing techniques.