Efficient and Effective Image Copyright Enforcement

National audienceWith the proliferation of high-speed internet access, piracy of multimedia data has developed into a major problem and media distributors, such as photo agencies, are making strong efforts to protect their digital property. Some recent work on image processing has therefore focused on content-based methods to detect image copyright violations, and a ``local descriptor'' method, which extracts several characteristic points of an image and describes through high-dimensional vectors, has been shown to be quite effective, albeit very inefficient. We have applied a recent approximate query processing method, the OMEDRANK algorithm, to the image copyright protection method above and shown that it does not result in more efficient query processing without sacrificing the quality of the results. Therefore we have proposed a new index structure, the PVS-index, which segments the descriptor collection based on projections to random lines and utilizes all the nice properties of the OMEDRANK algorithm. In a detailed performance study using a collection of over 20 million image descriptors, we show that using OMEDRANK on top of the PVS-index results in extremely efficient and effective query processing