A Multi-Stage Approach to Secure Digital Image Search over Public Cloud using Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) Algorithm

Digital image processing and retrieving have increasingly become very popular on the Internet and getting more attention from various multimedia fields. That results in additional privacy requirements placed on efficient image matching techniques in various applications. Hence, several searching methods have been developed when confidential images are used in image matching between pairs of security agencies, most of these search methods either limited by its cost or precision. This study proposes a secure and efficient method that preserves image privacy and confidentially between two communicating parties. To retrieve an image, feature vector is extracted from the given query image, and then the similarities with the stored database images features vector are calculated to retrieve the matched images based on an indexing scheme and matching strategy. We used a secure content-based image retrieval features detector algorithm called Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm over public cloud to extract the features and the Honey Encryption algorithm. The purpose of using the encrypted images database is to provide an accurate searching through encrypted documents without needing decryption. Progress in this area helps protect the privacy of sensitive data stored on the cloud. The experimental results (conducted on a well-known image-set) show that the performance of the proposed methodology achieved a noticeable enhancement level in terms of precision, recall, F-Measure, and execution time.