A privacy-preserving content-based image retrieval method in cloud environment

In order to protect data privacy, image with sensitive or private information needs to be encrypted before being outsourced to a cloud service provider. However, this causes difficulties in image retrieval and data management. A privacy-preserving content-based image retrieval method based on orthogonal decomposition is proposed in the paper. The image is divided into two different components, for which encryption and feature extraction are executed separately. As a result, cloud server can extract features from an encrypted image directly and compare them with the features of the queried images, so that users can thus obtain the image. Different from other methods, the proposed method has no special requirements to encryption algorithms, which makes it more universal and can be applied in different scenarios. Experimental results prove that the proposed method can achieve better security and better retrieval performance.