An Image Authentication Scheme Using Merkle Tree Mechanisms
Open accessAbstract
Research on digital image processing has become quite popular and rapid in recent years, and scholars have proposed various image verification mechanisms. Similarly , blockchain technology has also become very popular in recent years. This paper proposes a new image verification mechanism based on the Merkle tree technique in the blockchain. The Merkle tree root in the blockchain mechanism provides a reliable environment for storage of image features. In image verification, the verification of each image can be performed by the Merkle tree mechanism to obtain the hash value of the Merkle tree node on the path. In addition, the method combines the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) to improve the availability of images. The main purpose of this paper is to achieve the goal of image integrity verification. The proposed method can not only verify the integrity of the image but also restore the tampered area in the case of image tampering. Since the proposed method employs the blockchain mechanism, the image verification mechanism does not need third party resources . The verification method is performed by each node in the blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully achieved the goal of image authentication and tampered area restoration.
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When detecting the originality of an image, traversing the data of each block in the original Merkle tree of the blockchain and retrieving the approximate image through image multidimensional data is inefficient and does not support multidimensional data querying.
“When detecting the originality of an image, the system traverses the data of each block in the original Merkle tree of the blockchain and retrieves the approximate image through the image multidimensional data to determine its originality, which is an inefficient way of querying and does not support the multidimensional data querying [10].”
From Digital Image Copyright Protection and Management Approach—Based on Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Technology (2025) · cites this paper as [10]
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- Authors
- Chen, Y.-C., Chou, Y.-P., & Chou, Y.-C.
- Affiliations
- Asia University (TW)
- Corresponding author
- Chou, Yung-Chen
- Venue
- Future Internet
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2019-07-06
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 149
- ISSN
- 1999-5903 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2953790105
- Cited by
- 47
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 5.29
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- dx.doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Future Internet (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- 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 › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
- Keywords
- image authentication, Merkle trees, blockchain, image integrity verification, IPFS, image forgery detection, imaging features, distributed verification
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