Crypt-OR:A privacy-preserving system for exemplar-based object-removal over the cloud

Abstract

<div>Object removal is a technique for removing the undesired object(s) and then fill-in the empty region(s) in an image such that the modified image is visually plausible. The existing algorithms are unable to provide promising results when the region to be removed - has varying textured-neighborhood, is small in size and the depth of the image and, is of specific geometric shapes such as triangle</div><div>and rectangle. In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm by incorporating the merits of partial differential equations (PDEs) and exemplar-based schemes to address these challenges. The data term, which measures the continuity of</div><div>isophotes in exemplar-based methods, is modified by incorporating a regularizer term and partial derivatives up to second order of the input image. This regularizer enhances the strength of isophotes striking the boundary and boosts</div><div>the information propagation in an unbiased manner, in terms of pixel intensity values. Additionally, the low-cost, agility, and accessing flexibility benefits of cloud services have attracted user’s attention today. Besides, users are concerned about utilizing them for their data, as they are supported by untrusted third parties. Addressing these privacy concerns for object-removal in an image over the cloud server, we extended and modified our algorithm to make it compatible for (T; N)-threshold Shamir secret sharing scheme (SSS). This privacy-preserving system is an end-to-end system for object-removal in the ED over the cloud server namely Crypt-OR. Crypt-OR is evaluated by removing synthetically imposed objects in real-images. Further, Crypt-OR has proved to be secure under various pixel-based cryptographic attacks such as frequency-known attack and pixel-correlation attack. </div>