PLCOM: Privacy-preserving outsourcing computation of Legendre circularly orthogonal moment over encrypted image data.

•We develop a novel feature descriptor, named Legendre Circularly Orthogonal Moment (LCOM).•We present a mathematical framework for implementing Privacy-preserving LCOM (PLCOM).•Image reconstruction in the encrypted domain is implement by utilizing PLCOM.•The detailed theoretical analysis shows that LCOM and image reconstruction in the plaintext domain can be realized with the aid of PLCOM.•Experimental results verify that the PLCOM’s performance in terms of image reconstruction capability and image recognition accuracy is acceptable.