``A Study of Easy Search Method of illegally Copy Image Using Correlation Coefficient''   
   
Prof. Hideo Kuroda
FPT University
   
 
Abstract:
  Due to the remarkable popularization of mobile phones with built-in high-function camera and the speedup of the network, creation of content on personal basis and uploading and downloading of created contents are performed frequently. In such a situation, the content of others can also be seen freely. As a result, infringement of copyright such as illegal copying occurs frequently irrespective of the presence or absence of malice. Therefore, countermeasures against copyright infringement are extremely important. One of the countermeasures is a digital watermark. In the digital watermarking method, the rights holder registers his own copyright information into the certificate authority, and embeds the copyright information in own content in an invisible form. Then, copyright is asserted by extracting own copyright information from currently distributed images. Generally, complicated processing is used for embedding / extracting copyright information. On the other hand, image compression such as JPEG or MPEG is performed from the viewpoint of reducing the image transmission speed and compressing the file storage memory amount. In these, the pixel value changes by quantization and the high frequency component compression. In addition, geometric processing such as enlargement / reduction and rotation of images, decorative processing such as border decoration may also be performed. As described above, the types of attacks on images are extremely varied, and it is extremely difficult for the copyright holder to identify and extract their own copyright information from a large amount of images subjected to various kinds of attacks. In joint research by FPT University, Nagasaki University, and Kanazawa University, we propose a candidate image retrieval method for illegal copies without any digital watermarking technology. By this, the copyright holder using own digital watermarking technique may only check a quite small number of illegal copy candidate images identified by pre-searching. The proposed method by the universities is simple and robust for various attacked images.