Performance Enhancement of Patch-based Descriptors for Image Copy Detection

Images have become main sources for the information, learning, and entertainment, but due to the advancement and progress in multimedia technologies, millions of images are shared on Internet daily which can be easily duplicated and redistributed. Distribution of these duplicated and transformed images cause a lot of problems and challenges such as piracy, redundancy, and content-based image indexing and retrieval. To address these problems, copy detection system based on local features are widely used. Initially, keypoints are detected and represented by some robust descriptors. The descriptors are computed over the affine patches around the keypoints, these patches should be repeatable under photometric and geometric transformations. However, there exist two main challenges with patch based descriptors, (1) the affine patch over the keypoint can produce similar descriptors under entirely different scene or the context which causes “ambiguity”, and (2) the descriptors are not enough “distinctive” under image noise. Due to these limitations, the copy detection systems suffer in performance. We present a framework that makes descriptor more distinguishable and robust by influencing them with the texture and gradients in vicinity. The experimental evaluation on keypoints matching and image copy detection under severe transformations shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Keywords—Content-based image copy detection, SIFT, CSLBP, robust descriptors, patch based descriptors