A robust soft hash algorithm for digital image signature

Frédéric Lefèbvre, Jacek Czyz, Benoît Macq

Abstract: Watermarking is largely used for copyright protection and fast search of images in databases. Another method for securely identifying images is to use hash functions. Digital signature standard, used in cryptosystem to dispute authentication documents, is based on hash functions. A digital signature is a bit stream dependent on key and content of document. For each document, the digital signature algorithm provides a unique output bit stream. In order to be efficient in images, the digital signature should be different if and only if the image content, and not the input bit stream, is different. Our new method is a one-way function for images. Using the radon transform and principal component analysis, we extract characteristics robust against geometrical transformation (rotation and scaling) and image processing attacks (compression, filtering, blurring).