A Privacy-Preserving Image Retrieval Scheme with a Mixture of Plain and EtC Images
This addresses privacy concerns in image retrieval systems by allowing secure handling of sensitive data without sacrificing accuracy.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling content-based image retrieval on a mix of plain and encrypted images, achieving nearly identical retrieval performance to using only plain images.
In this paper, we propose a novel content-based image-retrieval scheme that allows us to use a mixture of plain images and compressible encrypted ones called "encryption-then-compression (EtC) images." In the proposed scheme, extended SIMPLE descriptors are extracted from EtC images as well as from plain ones, so the mixed use of plain and encrypted images is available for image retrieval. In an experiment, the proposed scheme was demonstrated to have almost the same retrieval performance as that for plain images, even with a mixture of plain and encrypted images.