A High-Performance Region Recognition Network-Enhanced Deep CNN for Image Content Perceptual Hashing

Perceptual image hashing has emerged as a crucial forensic tool within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Traditional perceptual hashing algorithms predominantly rely on global image features to generate hash codes, which limit their ability to represent key features of images effectively. This article introduces a perceptual region recognition network (PRRN) to accurately identify key feature regions in images based on their texture distribution characteristics, thereby generating image perceptual hashing codes that reflect the key content of the images. At the same time, a perceptual hashing feature extraction module, which integrates a residual network (ResNet) and a weighted feature fusion network (WFFN), is built to extract deep semantic features of the object image. Where, ResNet is leveraged to extract high-level semantic features, while WFFN ensures the preservation of low-level local features. Furthermore, skip connections are employed to achieve content enhancements for intricate details of critical image regions. Additionally, the mean-squared error (MSE) loss is incorporated to enhance the accuracy of key region localization, further improving the sensitivity of image perceptual hash codes and accelerating the network’s convergence speed. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed PRRN-based perceptual image hashing scheme significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of image feature representation capability. Specifically, it achieves an average improvement of over 1.2% in attack-resistant capability for images compared with other counterparts, making it a promising candidate for practical applications in the IoT environment.