Real-time near replica detection over massive streams of shared photos

Aquest treball es basa en la detecció en temps real de repliques d'imatges en entorns distribuïts a partir de la indexació de vectors de característiques locals

An Evaluation of Popular Copy-Move Forgery Detection Approaches

A copy-move forgery is created by copying and pasting content within the same image, and potentially post-processing it. In recent years, the detection of copy-move forgeries has become one of the most actively researched topics in blind image forensics. A considerable number of different algorithms have been proposed focusing on different types of postprocessed copies. In this paper, we aim to answer which copy-move forgery detection algorithms and processing steps (e.g., matching, filtering, outlier detection, affine transformation estimation) perform best in various postprocessing scenarios. The focus of our analysis is to evaluate the performance of previously proposed feature sets. We achieve this by casting existing algorithms in a common pipeline. In this paper, we examined the 15 most prominent feature sets. We analyzed the detection performance on a per-image basis and on a per-pixel basis. We created a challenging real-world copy-move dataset, and a software framework for systematic image manipulation. Experiments show, that the keypoint-based features SIFT and SURF, as well as the block-based DCT, DWT, KPCA, PCA and Zernike features perform very well. These feature sets exhibit the best robustness against various noise sources and downsampling, while reliably identifying the copied regions.Comment: Main paper: 14 pages, supplemental material: 12 pages, main paper appeared in IEEE Transaction on Information Forensics and Securit

Efficient image copy detection using multi-scale fingerprints

Inspired by multi-resolution histogram, we propose a multi-scale SIFT descriptor to improve the discriminability. A series of SIFT descriptions with different scale are first acquired by varying the actual size of each spatial bin. Then principle component analysis (PCA) is employed to reduce them to low dimensional vectors, which are further combined into one 128-dimension multi-scale SIFT description. Next, an entropy maximization based binarization is employed to encode the descriptions into binary codes called fingerprints for indexing the local features. Furthermore, an efficient search architecture consisting of lookup tables and inverted image ID list is designed to improve the query speed. Since the fingerprint building is of low-complexity, this method is very efficient and scalable to very large databases. In addition, the multi-scale fingerprints are very discriminative such that the copies can be effectively distinguished from similar objects, which leads to an improved performance in the detection of copies. The experimental evaluation shows that our approach outperforms the state of the art methods.Inspired by multi-resolution histogram, we propose a multi-scale SIFT descriptor to improve the discriminability. A series of SIFT descriptions with different scale are first acquired by varying the actual size of each spatial bin. Then principle component analysis (PCA) is employed to reduce them to low dimensional vectors, which are further combined into one 128-dimension multi-scale SIFT description. Next, an entropy maximization based binarization is employed to encode the descriptions into binary codes called fingerprints for indexing the local features. Furthermore, an efficient search architecture consisting of lookup tables and inverted image ID list is designed to improve the query speed. Since the fingerprint building is of low-complexity, this method is very efficient and scalable to very large databases. In addition, the multi-scale fingerprints are very discriminative such that the copies can be effectively distinguished from similar objects, which leads to an improved performance in the detection of copies. The experimental evaluation shows that our approach outperforms the state of the art methods

Performance Evaluation of State-of-the-art Filtering Criteria Applied to SIFT Features

International audienceUnlike the matching strategy of minimizing dissimilarity measure between descriptors, Lowe, while introducing the SIFT-method, suggested a more effective matching strategy using the ratio between the nearest and the second nearest neighbor. It leads to excellent matching accuracy. Unlike all these strategies that rely on deterministic formalism, some researchers have recently opted for statistical analysis of the matching process. The cornerstone of this formalism exploits the Markov inequality and the ratio criterion has been interpreted as an upper bound on the probability that a match do not belong to the background distribution. In this paper, we first examine some of the assumptions and methods used in these works and demonstrate their inconsistencies. And then, we propose improvements by refining the bound, by providing a tighter bound on that probability. The fact that the ratio criterion is an upper bound indicates that refining the bound reduces the probability that the established matches come from the background. Experiments on the well-known Oxford-5k and Paris-6k datasets show performance improvement for the image retrieval application

2D Reconstruction of Small Intestine's Interior Wall

Examining and interpreting of a large number of wireless endoscopic images from the gastrointestinal tract is a tiresome task for physicians. A practical solution is to automatically construct a two dimensional representation of the gastrointestinal tract for easy inspection. However, little has been done on wireless endoscopic image stitching, let alone systematic investigation. The proposed new wireless endoscopic image stitching method consists of two main steps to improve the accuracy and efficiency of image registration. First, the keypoints are extracted by Principle Component Analysis and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (PCA-SIFT) algorithm and refined with Maximum Likelihood Estimation SAmple Consensus (MLESAC) outlier removal to find the most reliable keypoints. Second, the optimal transformation parameters obtained from first step are fed to the Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) algorithm as an initial solution. With modified Marquardt-Levenberg search strategy in a multiscale framework, the NMI can find the optimal transformation parameters in the shortest time. The proposed methodology has been tested on two different datasets - one with real wireless endoscopic images and another with images obtained from Micro-Ball (a new wireless cubic endoscopy system with six image sensors). The results have demonstrated the accuracy and robustness of the proposed methodology both visually and quantitatively.Comment: Journal draf

Real-time near replica detection over massive streams of shared photos

Aquest treball es basa en la detecció en temps real de repliques d'imatges en entorns distribuïts a partir de la indexació de vectors de característiques locals

Detection of near-duplicates in large image collections

The vast numbers of images on the Web include many duplicates, and an even larger number of near-duplicate variants derived from the same original. These include thumbnails stored by search engines, copies shared by various news portals, and images that appear on multiple web sites, legitimately or otherwise. Such near-duplicates appear in the results of many web image searches, and constitute redundancy, and may also represent infringements of copyright. Digital images can be easily altered through simple digital manipulation such as conversion to grey-scale, colour balance change, rescaling, rotation, and cropping. Any of these operations defeat simple duplicate detection methods such as bit-level hashing. The ability to detect such variants with a reasonable degree of reliability and accuracy would support reduction of redundancy in collections and in presentation of search results, and also allow detection of possible copyright violations. Some existing methods for identifying near-duplicates are derived from computer vision techniques; these have shown high effectiveness for this domain, but are computationally expensive, and therefore impractical for large image collections. Other methods address the problem using conventional CBIR approaches that are more efficient but are typically not as robust. None of the previous methods have addressed the problem in its entirety, and none have addressed the large scale near-duplicate problem on the Web; there has been no analysis of the kinds of alterations that are common on the Web, nor any or evaluation of whether real cases of near-duplication can in fact be identified. In this thesis, we analyse the different types of alterations and near-duplicates existent in a range of popular web image searches, and establish a collection and evaluation ground truth using real-world near-duplicate examples. We present a simple ranking approach to reduce the number of local-descriptors, and therefore improve the efficiency of the descriptor-based retrieval method for near-duplicate detection. The descriptor-based method has been shown to produce near-perfect detection of near-duplicates, but was previously computationally very expensive. We show that while maintaining comparable effectiveness, our method scales well for large collections of hundreds of thousands of images. We also explore a more compact indexing structure to support near duplicate image detection. We develop a method to automatically detect the pair-wise near-duplicate relationship of images without the use of a query. We adapt the hash-based probabilistic counting method --- originally used for near-duplicate text document detection --- with the local descriptors; our adaptation offers the first effective and efficient non-query-based approach to this domain. We further incorporate our pair-wise detection approach for clustering of near-duplicates. We present a clustering method specifically for near-duplicate images, where our method is arguably the first clustering method to achieve a high level of effectiveness in this domain. We also show that near-duplicates within a large collection of a million images can be effectively clustered using our approach in less than an hour using relatively modest computational resources. Overall, our proposed methods provide practical approaches to the detection and management of near-duplicate images in large collection