Toward privacy-preserving JPEG image retrieval

This paper proposes a privacy-preserving retrieval scheme for JPEG images based on local variance. Three parties are involved in the scheme: the content owner, the server, and the authorized user. The content owner encrypts JPEG images for privacy protection by jointly using permutation cipher and stream cipher, and then, the encrypted versions are uploaded to the server. With an encrypted query image provided by an authorized user, the server may extract blockwise local variances in different directions without knowing the plaintext content. After that, it can calculate the similarity between the encrypted query image and each encrypted database image by a local variance-based feature comparison mechanism. The authorized user with the encryption key can decrypt the returned encrypted images with plaintext content similar to the query image. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme not only provides effective privacy-preserving retrieval service but also ensures both format compliance and file size preservation for encrypted JPEG images. (C) 2017 SPIE and IS&T