MELBOURNE - One in five Australians has admitted to being the subject of online "image abuse", where photographs - often of an explicit nature - are unknowingly shared online, according the results of a survey released on Monday.

The survey into the phenomenon, also known as "revenge porn", carried out by Monash University and RMIT University among 4,274 people aged 16 to 49 showed that 22 percent of men and 23 percent of women had been the victim of "image abuse".

According to the survey, the most common types of abuse were having sexual or nude images taken without consent (20 percent), the distribution of images without consent (11 percent) and threatening to have images shared (9 percent).