RIME: A Replicated Image Detector for the World-Wide Web

Abstract

This paper describes RIME (Replicated IMage dEtector), an alternative approach to watermarking for detecting unauthorized image copying on the Internet. RIME profiles internet images and stores the feature vectors of the images and their URLs in its repository. When a copy detection request is received, RIME matches the requested image's feature vector with the vectors stored in the repository and returns a list of suspect URLs. RIME characterizes each image using Daubechies' wavelets. The wavelet coefficients are stored as the feature vector. RIME uses a multidimensional extensible hashing scheme to index these high-dimensional feature vectors. Our preliminary result shows that it can detect image copies effectively: It can find the top suspects and copes well with image format conversion, resampling, and requantization.