Robust image hash function using local color features

Conventional image hash functions only exploit luminance components of color images to generate robust hashes and then lead to limited discriminative capacities. In this paper, we propose a robust image hash function for color images, which takes all components of color images into account and achieves good discrimination. Firstly, the proposed hash function re-scales the input image to a fixed size. Secondly, it extracts local color features by converting the RGB color image into HSI and YCbCr color spaces and calculating the block mean and variance from each component of the HSI and YCbCr representations. Finally, it takes the Euclidian distances between the block features and a reference feature as hash values. Experiments are conducted to validate the efficiency of our hash function. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve comparisons with two existing algorithms demonstrate that our hash function outperforms the assessed algorithms in classification performances between perceptual robustness and discriminative capability. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.