Robust Hashing Based on Quaternion Zernike Moments for Image Authentication

The reliability and security of multimedia contents in transmission, communications, storage, and usage have attracted special attention. Robust image hashing, also referred to as perceptual image hashing, is widely applied in multimedia authentication and forensics, image retrieval, image indexing, and digital image watermarking. In this work, a novel robust image hashing method based on quaternion Zernike moments (QZMs) is proposed. QZMs offer a sound way to jointly deal with the three channels of color images without discarding chrominance information; the generated hash is thus shorter than the hash of three channels separately processing. The proposed approach's performance was evaluated on the color images database of UCID and compared with several recent and efficient methods. These experiments show that the proposed scheme provides a short hash in length that is robust to most common image content-preserving manipulations like JPEG compression, filtering, noise, scaling, and large angle rotation operations.