Privacy‐preserving CNN feature extraction and retrieval over medical images

Online medicine diagnosis based on pathological images has been regarded as a pervasive method due to the advances in electronic healthcare and Internet of Things (IoT), however, it also causes storage and computing stress on the local IoT devices. To solve this problem, a nature way is to outsource images to cloud servers. Unfortunately, a range of security and privacy issues arise while delegating both storage and computing to the untrusted external servers. In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving feature extraction and retrieval scheme over medical images, which allows images storage and processing on two separate cloud servers. We share the images using secret sharing technology and design a set of secure two-party computation protocols between the two cloud servers. Then a privacy-preserving convolutional neural networks (CNN) framework is constructed to achieve feature extraction, classification and retrieval of images in the encrypted domain. We analyse and evaluate our scheme in terms of both security and efficiency. The results indicate that the proposed secure protocols in our scheme can significantly reduce the computation overhead while protecting the privacy of images as well as the data generated during execution on cloud servers and final results. The performance of our scheme in image feature extraction, classification and retrieval is at a similar level comparable to the scheme based on original CNN in plaintext.