On Secure Image Hashing by Higher-Order Statistics

Due to the fact that the same multimedia content can have different digital representations, content-based hashing is important for multimedia identification and authentication. In this paper we discuss some issues on image hashing by higher-order statistics. We show by experiments that fourth-order cumulants can be used for image hashing and they have better overall performance than fourth-order-moments which are used in an existing algorithm. We further extend the algorithm to a more secure version by incorporating a secret key. It is achieved by choosing different statistic patterns from image blocks according to a secure pseudo-random number generator. Simulation shows satisfactory results.