A Novel Perceptual Hashing for Color Images Using a Full Quaternion Representation

Quaternions have been commonly employed in color image processing, but when the existing pure quaternion representation for color images is used in perceptual hashing, it would degrade the robustness performance since it is sensitive to image manipulations. To improve the robustness in color image perceptual hashing, in this paper a full quaternion representation for color images is proposed by introducing the local image luminance variances. Based on this new representation, a novel Full Quaternion Discrete Cosine Transform (FQDCT)-based hashing is proposed, in which the Quaternion Discrete Cosine Transform (QDCT) is applied to the pseudo-randomly selected regions of the novel full quaternion image to construct two feature matrices. A new hash value in binary is generated from these two matrices. Our experimental results have validated the robustness improvement brought by the proposed full quaternion representation and demonstrated that better performance can be achieved in the proposed FQDCT-based hashing than that in other notable quaternion-based hashing schemes in terms of robustness and discriminability.