A Splitting-Based Cloud Storage Mechanism for Digital Images

Due to the development of cloud computing and datacenters, the task of data processing and storage has migrated to the cloud platforms gradually. As a special kind of data, digital images contain a lot of private information, and require a huge amount of storage resources with frequent addition and deletion. Although storing digital images on cloud servers could solve some of these challenges, the quality of service provided by some of these servers is not reliable enough, especially when privacy issues are concerned. This paper proposes a splitting-based cloud storage mechanism for digital images. After splitting images into several blocks or layers and storing them into different cloud storage platforms, the privacy and reliability of these images can be enhanced. Two image splitting algorithms are proposed: block-based splitting and layer-based splitting. An image storage tool for privacy protection is implemented to demonstrate the mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques are able to provide privacy protection, at the same time enhancing the reliability and performance when storing digital images to the cloud. Performance under different cloud storage services, different splitting algorithms and different splitting granularities are also provided and analyzed. Finally, privacy-related issues and challenges are discussed.