Decentralised Image Sharing and Copyright Protection using Blockchain and Perceptual Hashes
Abstract
In this paper, we aim to address the major problem of correct image attribution for photos being uploaded on the stock photo websites and peer-to-peer image sharing marketplaces, ensuring that original photographers are rightfully recognized and credited for their works. There are now millions of royalty-free images being shared every week on stock photo websites. There is a major discontent among photographers and graphics designers who share images on such websites regarding a widespread malpractice where others try to take credit for and benefit from original author's work. This happens when someone other than the original author uploads the same image as one already shared on the marketplace or uses image processing methods such as rotation, cropping, gray scale conversion etc and then uploads this tampered image to avoid copyright violation detection. To counter such problems, we propose a decentralised peer-to-peer photo sharing marketplace built on top of Ethereum test chain and demonstrate how it is fair, trustworthy and practical. Our decentralised application leverages perceptual hashes and robust smart contracts of Ethereum to automatically detect and reject tampered images that are perceptually similar to images already present on the marketplace. Due to inherent properties of Blockchain, our marketplace has no central authority controlling it, no third party interference, no single point of failure, zero-censorship and preserves online user privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides a practical solution for automatically detecting and rejecting perceptually similar images on a decentralised image sharing platform, thus protecting the copyrights of genuine image authors.
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- Authors
- Mehta, R., Kapoor, N., Sourav, S., & Shorey, R.
- Affiliations
- Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IN)
- Delhi Technological University (IN)
- ORCID
- Shorey, Rajeev
- Venue
- 2019 11th International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2019-01
- Pages
- 1-6
- OpenAlex
- W2945633032
- Cited by
- 55
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 4.58
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- Locations
- International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology in Education and Learning
- Keywords
- image copyright protection, image attribution, perceptual hashing, blockchain, Ethereum smart contracts, image forgery detection, decentralized applications
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