SIFT Keypoint Removal and Injection via Convex Relaxation

Scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), as one of the most popular local feature extraction algorithms, has been widely employed in many computer vision and multimedia security applications. Although SIFT has been extensively investigated from various perspectives, its security against malicious attacks has rarely been discussed. In this paper, we show that the SIFT keypoints can be effectively removed with minimized distortion on the processed image. The SIFT keypoint removal is formulated as a constrained optimization problem, where the constraints are carefully designed to suppress the existence of local extrema and prevent generating new keypoints within a local cuboid in the scale space. To hide the traces of performing SIFT keypoint removal, we then propose to inject a large number of fake SIFT keypoints into the previously cleaned image with minimized distortion. As demonstrated experimentally, our proposed SIFT removal and injection algorithms significantly outperform the state-of-the-art techniques. Furthermore, it is shown that the combined SIFT keypoint removal and injection attack strategy is capable of defeating the most powerful forensic detector designed for SIFT keypoint removal. Our results suggest that an authorization mechanism is required for SIFT-based systems to verify the validity of the input data, so as to achieve high reliability.