A Content-Based Image Retrieval Scheme Using an Encrypted Difference Histogram in Cloud Computing

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been widely used in many applications. Large storage and computation overheads have made the outsourcing of CBIR services attractive. However, the privacy issues brought by outsourcing have become a big problem. In this paper, a secure CBIR scheme based on an encrypted difference histogram (EDH-CBIR) is proposed. Firstly, the image owner calculates the order or disorder difference matrices of RGB components and encrypts them by value replacement and position scrambling. The encrypted images are then uploaded to the cloud server who extracts encrypted difference histograms as image feature vectors. To search similar images, the query image is encrypted by the image users as the image owner does, and the query feature vector is extracted by the cloud server. The Euclidean distance between query feature vector and image feature vector is calculated to measure the similarity. The security analysis and experiments demonstrate the usability of the proposed scheme.