A Format-compatible Searchable Encryption Scheme for JPEG Images Using Bag-of-words

The development of cloud computing attracts enterprises and individuals to outsource their data, such as images, to the cloud server. However, direct outsourcing causes the extensive concern of privacy leakage, as images often contain rich sensitive information. A straightforward way to protect privacy is to encrypt the images using the standard cryptographic tools before outsourcing. However, in such a way the possible usage of the outsourced images would be strongly limited together with the services provided to users, like the Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). In this article, we propose a secure outsourced CBIR scheme, in which an encryption scheme is designed for the widely used JPEG-format images, and the secure features can be directly extracted from such encrypted images. Specifically, the JPEG images are encrypted by the block permutation, intra-block permutation, polyalphabetic cipher, and stream cipher. Then secure local histograms are extracted from the encrypted DCT blocks and the Bag-Of-Words (BOW) model is further used to organize the encrypted local features to represent the image. The proposed image encryption gets all of the image data protected and the experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves improved accuracy with a small file size expansion.