Oblivious Image Matching

We present the problem of Oblivious Image Matching, where two parties want to determine whether they have images of the same object or scene, without revealing any additional information. While image matching has attracted a great deal of attention in the computer vision community, it was never treated in a cryptographic sense. In this paper we study the private version of the problem, oblivious image matching, and provide an efficient protocol for it. In doing so, we design a novel image matching algorithm, and a few private protocols that may be of independent interest. Specifically, we first show how to reduce the image matching problem to a two-level version of the fuzzy set matching problem, and then present a novel protocol to privately compute this (and several other) matching problems.