Robust Image Hashing for Tamper Detection Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

The invariance relation existing in the non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is used for constructing robust image hashes in this work. The image is first re-scaled to a fixed size. Low-pass filtering is performed on the luminance component of the re-sized image to produce a normalized matrix. Entries in the normalized matrix are pseudo-randomly re-arranged under the control of a secret key to generate a secondary image. Non-negative matrix factorization is then performed on the secondary image. As the relation between most pairs of adjacent entries in the NMF's coefficient matrix is basically invariant to ordinary image processing, a coarse quantization scheme is devised to compress the extracted features contained in the coefficient matrix. The obtained binary elements are used to form the image hash after being scrambled based on another key. Similarity between hashes is measured by the Hamming distance. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against perceptually acceptable modifications to the image such as Gaussian filtering, moderate noise contamination, JPEG compression, re-scaling, and watermark embedding. Hashes of different images have very low collision probability. Tampering to local image areas can be detected by comparing the Hamming distance with a predetermined threshold, indicating the usefulness of the technique in digital forensics.