Using segmentation for confidentiality aware image storage and retrieval on clouds

Cloud computing is ideally suited for hosting applications with large images because clouds can perform high performance computations and communications at very low upfront cost. While the benefits of clouds are compelling for image processing applications, security and privacy issues in using clouds are creating major problems. Because clouds are not passive storage devices, it is important to avoid encryption schemes that secure the data while preventing efficient processing of the data by the clouds. Therefore, this paper, is investigating approaches where segmentation is used to split the image data across multiple clouds. We show that segmentation, although a simple idea, can bring several benefits when deployed in cloud computing. A prototype of the system has been developed and initial performance results are reported here.