Detection of Tampered Images Using Blockchain Technology

Multimedia data, especially images are increasing dramatically. Images published on the Web are more often facing the risk of being tampered or manipulated since their content is easily mutable. Using blockchain technology provides advantages and, at the same time, challenges when dealing with this issue due to the following reasons: (a) data in a blockchain are well saved and immutable and (b) adding the data directly to a blockchain may consume much time which makes it computationally and economically expensive. Thus, we propose a blockchain-based solution which considers two key aspects: First, using a blockchain to register information about ownership and copyrights for authors, as well as descriptive information of an image, used to detect copyright violations. Second, avoiding insertion of raw image data into the blockchain, but storing only unique descriptive metadata about the images, allowing for a more efficient implementation of the system. This work considers different well-known image matching approaches to validate the power of the proposed approach, which allows for an efficient checking of violations of copyrights for a given image.