Privacy-preserving Image Processing in the Cloud

Millions of private images are generated in various digital devices every day. The consequent massive computational workload makes people turn to cloud computing platforms for their economical computation resources. Meanwhile, the privacy concerns over the sensitive information contained in outsourced image data arise in public. In fact, once uploaded to the cloud, the security and privacy of the image content can only presume upon the reliability of the cloud service providers. Lack of assuring security and privacy guarantees becomes the main barrier to further deployment of cloud-based image processing systems. This paper studies the design targets and technical challenges lie in constructing cloud-based privacy-preserving image processing system. We explore various image processing tasks, including image feature detection, digital watermarking, content-based image search. The state-of-the-art techniques, including secure multiparty computation, and homomorphic encryption are investigated. A detailed taxonomy of the problem statement and the corresponding solutions is provided.