A lightweight-client and privacy preserving content-based image retrieval in cloud environment

Image storage and retrieval incur high storage and computation complexities and cloud computing offers an attractive choice for the image storage outsourcing and the on-demand access. Since the outsourced images often include sensitive information, privacy-preserving image outsourcing scheme becomes the biggest research hot spot. In this paper, we proposed a lightweight-client and privacy-preserving content-based image retrieval (CBIR) scheme, which has the following advantages: (1) to improve search accuracy, color and texture feature are integrated to construct index; (2) to reduce the client (owner and user) burden, computationally intensive tasks, texture feature extraction and index construction, are securely outsourced to cloud server; (3) to enhance search efficiency, a two-layer index structure is also adopted. The security analysis and the experiments show the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme.