A Secure and Robust Autoencoder-Based Perceptual Image Hashing for Image Authentication

Abstract

With the advancement of technology, it has become easier to modify or tamper with digital data effortlessly. In recent times, the image hashing algorithm has gained popularity for image authentication applications. In this paper, a convolutional stacked denoising autoencoder (CSDAE) is utilized for producing hash codes that are robust against different content preserving operations (CPOs). The CSDAE algorithm comprises mapping high-dimensional input data into hash codes while maintaining their semantic similarities. This implies that the images having similar content should have similar hash codes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the model, the correlation between hash codes of semantically similar images has been evaluated. Subsequently, tampered localization is done by comparing the decoder output of the manipulated image with the hash of the actual image. Then, the localization ability of the model was measured by computing the $f1$ scores between the predicted region and the original tampered region. Based on the comparative performance and receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) curve, we may conclude that the proposed hashing proposed algorithm provides improved performance compared to various state-of-the-art techniques.