Secure Outsourced SIFT: Accurate and Efficient Privacy-Preserving Image SIFT Feature Extraction

Cloud computing has become an important IT infrastructure in the big data era; more and more users are motivated to outsource the storage and computation tasks to the cloud server for convenient services. However, privacy has become the biggest concern, and tasks are expected to be processed in a privacy-preserving manner. This paper proposes a secure SIFT feature extraction scheme with better integrity, accuracy and efficiency than the existing methods. SIFT includes lots of complex steps, including the construction of DoG scale space, extremum detection, extremum location adjustment, rejecting of extremum point with low contrast, eliminating of the edge response, orientation assignment, and descriptor generation. These complex steps need to be disassembled into elementary operations such as addition, multiplication, comparison for secure implementation. We adopt a serial of secret-sharing protocols for better accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we design a secure absolute value comparison protocol to support absolute value comparison operations in the secure SIFT feature extraction. The SIFT feature extraction steps are completely implemented in the ciphertext domain. And the communications between the clouds are appropriately packed to reduce the communication rounds. We carefully analyzed the accuracy and efficiency of our scheme. The experimental results show that our scheme outperforms the existing state-of-the-art.