Securing visual search queries in ubiquitous scenarios empowered by smart personal devices

Abstract Smart personal devices are assuming a fundamental role in the ubiquitous communication and computing arena. They provide new sophisticated cameras and new visual search interfaces and facilities that can drastically improve their presence and role in complex IoT-based critical infrastructures, such as healthcare monitoring and emergency systems, or remote access control facilities and smart authentication services. This new scenario calls for strong secure and resilient visual query mechanisms for these devices. In this work we propose an innovative secure visual search system, which is well-suited for ubiquitous computing scenarios empowered by modern smart personal devices. More precisely, we show how to insert, at the visual data acquisition time, a watermark inside the already compressed descriptor characterizing an MPEG-CDVS data stream used in visual queries, to make it possible to decode the watermark on the server side in order to improve the robustness against image-based identity spoofing. Such a security enforcement solution may be practical in several real-life applications involving visual queries performed from personal trusted devices, and it is particularly suitable in all those application domains that require performing visual queries with a high degree of security. It has been extensively tested and achieved satisfactory results: the presence of such a watermark does not affect the image matching performance and functionality.