First steps toward image phylogeny

In this paper, we introduce and formally define a new problem, Image Phylogeny Tree (IPT): to find the structure of transformations, and their parameters, that generate a given set of near duplicate images. This problem has direct applications in security, forensics, and copyright enforcement. We devise a method for calculating an asymmetric dissimilarity matrix from a set of near duplicate images. We also describe a new algorithm to build an IPT. We also analyze our algorithm's computational complexity. Finally, we perform experiments that show near-perfect reconstructed IPT results when using an appropriate dissimilarity function.