Encrypted Image Retrieval System based on Features Analysis

Abstract – Content-based search provides an important tool for users to consume the ever-growing digital media repositories. However, since communication between digital products takes place in a public network, the necessity of security for digital images becomes vital. Hence, the design of secure content-based image retrieval system is becoming an increasingly demanding task as never before. This paper, presents a mechanism that addresses the secure CBIR as a novel improvement and application for the image retrieval. The proposed system consists of six phases briefly described as follows: first, feature extraction phase, which produces the low-level quantitative description of the image (color and texture) that allows the computation of similarity measures, the definition of the ordering of the images, and the indexing of the search processes. Second, indexing for search process phase, hash table and bloom filter were employed for classification. Third, feature encryption phase, where content protection is performed using a method developed by us (including Chaotic Logistic Map). Fourth,  image encryption phase, as security mechanism for CBIR, we combine two research fields in computer science, CBIR and image cryptography, which grow up to meet the trends of security and speed in current computer sciences, chaos and stream cipher systems were applied as an image encryption system. Fifth, the retrieval phase, which provides a subset of images answering the query based on the similarity between images computed over the feature vector extracted from each image. Finally, Relevance feedback phase, a technique that attempts to capture the user’s needs through iterative feedback. Although the system proved its efficiency in search performance (with 88% of average precision), security strength, and computational complexity, it does not mean the optimal system is designed, since some weakness points still can be found that are suggested to be improved as a future work

Anonymous subject identification and privacy information management in video surveillance

The widespread deployment of surveillance cameras has raised serious privacy concerns, and many privacy-enhancing schemes have been recently proposed to automatically redact images of selected individuals in the surveillance video for protection. Of equal importance are the privacy and efficiency of techniques to first, identify those individuals for privacy protection and second, provide access to original surveillance video contents for security analysis. In this paper, we propose an anonymous subject identification and privacy data management system to be used in privacy-aware video surveillance. The anonymous subject identification system uses iris patterns to identify individuals for privacy protection. Anonymity of the iris-matching process is guaranteed through the use of a garbled-circuit (GC)-based iris matching protocol. A novel GC complexity reduction scheme is proposed by simplifying the iris masking process in the protocol. A user-centric privacy information management system is also proposed that allows subjects to anonymously access their privacy information via their iris patterns. The system is composed of two encrypted-domain protocols: The privacy information encryption protocol encrypts the original video records using the iris pattern acquired during the subject identification phase; the privacy information retrieval protocol allows the video records to be anonymously retrieved through a GC-based iris pattern matching process. Experimental results on a public iris biometric database demonstrate the validity of our framework

EsPRESSo: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Evaluation of Sample Set Similarity

Electronic information is increasingly often shared among entities without complete mutual trust. To address related security and privacy issues, a few cryptographic techniques have emerged that support privacy-preserving information sharing and retrieval. One interesting open problem in this context involves two parties that need to assess the similarity of their datasets, but are reluctant to disclose their actual content. This paper presents an efficient and provably-secure construction supporting the privacy-preserving evaluation of sample set similarity, where similarity is measured as the Jaccard index. We present two protocols: the first securely computes the (Jaccard) similarity of two sets, and the second approximates it, using MinHash techniques, with lower complexities. We show that our novel protocols are attractive in many compelling applications, including document/multimedia similarity, biometric authentication, and genetic tests. In the process, we demonstrate that our constructions are appreciably more efficient than prior work.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the 7th ESORICS International Workshop on Digital Privacy Management (DPM 2012). This is the full version, appearing in the Journal of Computer Securit

Roadmap on optical security

Postprint (author's final draft

MSUO Information Technology and Geographical Information Systems: Common Protocols & Procedures. Report to the Marine Safety Umbrella Operation

The Marine Safety Umbrella Operation (MSUO) facilitates the cooperation between Interreg funded Marine Safety Projects and maritime stakeholders. The main aim of MSUO is to permit efficient operation of new projects through Project Cooperation Initiatives, these include the review of the common protocols and procedures for Information Technology (IT) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This study carried out by CSA Group and the National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG) reviews current spatial information standards in Europe and the data management methodologies associated with different marine safety projects. International best practice was reviewed based on the combined experience of spatial data research at NCG and initiatives in the US, Canada and the UK relating to marine security service information and acquisition and integration of large marine datasets for ocean management purposes. This report identifies the most appropriate international data management practices that could be adopted for future MSUO projects