WK,QWHUQDWLRQDO&RQIHUHQFHRQ&RPPXQLFDWLRQ6\VWHPV

1HWZRUNV&2061(76
Decentralised Image Sharing and Copyright
Protection using Blockchain and Perceptual Hashes
Rishabh Mehta Naman Kapoor, Soumya Sourav
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Delhi Technological University
rmehta.visitor@iitd.ac.in {nk2016ti, s.sourav15}@gmail.com
Abstract—In this paper, we aim to address the major prob-
lem 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 automati-
cally 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.
Index Terms—Blockchain, Decentralised Image Sharing, Im-
age Copyright protection, Image Sharing Marketplace
I. I NTRODUCTION
In the current era of internet, many photographers now earn
their income by selling their images online, often through
stock photo agencies. The royalty-free and microstock busi-
ness models on such websites have led to intense compe-
tition among photographers where everyone is striving to
upload more images and get more downloads for their works.
More recently, this behaviour has led to a widespread image
attribution fraud where some non-authors to get credit for
other contributor’s images, in violation of copyright laws and
affecting rightful image owner mentally and financially. They
accomplish this by accessing images of original author from
stock photo websites and uploading thus obtained images
as it is or after manipulating some of the image features
on stock photo websites. While some stock photo websites
do check whether the new image being uploaded is already
present on the marketplace by usage of cryptographic hashes,
k,(((
Rajeev Shorey
TCS Research & Innovation
rajeev.shorey@tcs.com
they are unable to identify manipulated versions of original
images. This happens because cryptographic hashes are prone
to avalanche effect, a phenomenon where a small change in
input value leads to drastic change in output value. We address
these problems in this paper by creating an efficient Ethereum
based solution for image sharing and opt for perceptual hashes
[6]. Perceptual hashes keep away from avalanche effect and
are less susceptible to perceptual changes in images such as
rotation, cropping, re-sizing, conversion to gray scale, salt
and pepper noise, exposure or saturation change etc. The
paper demonstrates how using a Blockchain network coupled
with use of perceptual hashes and appropriate smart contract
logic can provide better mechanism for copyright violation
detection than current systems along with many benefits of
Blockchain such as permanent record of trade, transparency,
trust, immutability, high availability, information security and
cost savings.
A. Motivation
The fundamental motivation behind proposing a decen-
tralised image sharing marketplace is to correct image attribu-
tion and provide due credit to original image authors, which
is a major concern for photographers who share images on
stock photo websites. We aim to put in place robust yet fast
copyright violation detection mechanism. This when combined
with benefits of Blockchain based architecture can put the
power back in the hands of image contributors. The high
commission rates on stock photo websites, which may run
up to 55%, is also a common concern in the photography
community. We aim to get rid of these hefty commissions
entirely and create an architecture where the user has to
pay only for transaction charges related to processing of
transaction by the Blockchain network.
B. Novelty
The novel contributions of the project include employing
a programmable Blockchain Ethereum [1], [4] to create a
decentralised image sharing application, with the novel usage
of perceptual hashes and Ethereum’s robust smart contracts
[12], [15] for copyright violation detection. The photos on
the network are saved in a decentralised fashion through
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). We also provide compu-
tational results showcasing the effectiveness as well as some
limitations of our approach.
 II. S YSTEM E NVIRONMENT AND A RCHITECTURE
We use the following tools and technologies to build our
system. Detailed information about each can be found on their
respective websites and corresponding Github repositories.
• Metamask: Metamask is a plugin for browsers which
allows to make Ethereum transactions. It allows to run
Ethereum Dapps (Decentralised applications) without
having to run the full Ethereum node, manage identities
and sign Blockchain transactions.
• Ganache: Ganache is an Ethereum Blockchain emulator.
Ganache is in-memory Ethereum node that allows to test
all components locally. It also lets users deploy contracts,
develop application and run tests.
• Geth: Geth (Go-Ethereum) is a command line interface
which lets users run and operate full time Ethereum node.
It is implemented in Go and allows to mine blocks to
generate Ether, create smart contracts, send transactions
to transfer funds between Ethereum addresses, inspect
block history and many other functions.
• Truffle: Truffle is used to compile, test, build smart con-
tracts and provides a development framework to increase
speed in the development process.
The system architecture is shown in detail in Figure 1.
Various modules shown in the figure are described below:
• Buyer module: It offers searching tools to find the class of
images buyer is looking for among all the images present
on the decentralised application.
• Seller module: It provides simple way to upload the
image on the Blockchain. Seller uploads the image, along
with image name and description to help the searching
process.
• Wallet Module: This client side encrypted module allows
to create new Ethereum address or import existing ad-
dress, see wallet balance and transactions. Users can al-
ternatively use Metamask to manage accounts and wallet.
As can be seen from Figure 1, Ethereum gate connects with
the web client and allows access to Ethereum ecosystem. Web
client consists of buyer, seller and wallet modules. Transaction
module is used to specify image selling price while image
upload module is used to upload new image. A local database
stores this data and after the transaction is approved by
Ethereum network, the data and image is transferred to IPFS
after due encryption. We use public key cryptography for
encryption. Since IPFS is content addressable, this encryption
step is crucial for information protection. Ethereum gate con-
sists of Geth, parity and JSON-RPC (Remote procedure call)
protocol. Ethereum gate provides access to main Ethereum
network which consists of all user nodes, miners, smart
contracts and transaction blocks. Data flow among all modules
is shown in figure. IPFS and Ethereum network for information
storage purposes are explained in next section.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
We present two different architectures which differ in the
way they store data.
1) Eth Store: In this architecture images and hashes are
stored on the Ethereum chain itself. Images and per-
ceptual hashes are placed in Blockchain transactions.
The problem with this method is that as more and more
images get uploaded, the storage size of Blockchain will
increase rapidly since all the content is stored on the
testchain. Whenever new nodes arrive, they’ll have to
download the entire chain containing all the images. This
solution is definitely not scalable, especially since image
sizes may run into many Megabytes.
2) IPFS Store: In this architecture the images and hashes
are stored with Interplanetary file system (IPFS), a
decentralised peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution pro-
tocol. IPFS [5] is content addressable and uses cryp-
tographic hashes to give unique fingerprint to blocks
within files, removes redundancy across the network
and uses these unique hashes for information retrieval.
By storing images and perceptual hashes with the IPFS
protocol, we make large savings in size of the Ethereum
test chain. Data stored on IPFS can be encrypted with
any standard encryption scheme and retrieved. The en-
cryption keys will only be shared with appropriate buyer
via smart contract. This approach is scalable and is the
one used in our implementation.
A. Copyright infringement and computer vision
Perceptual hashes are multimedia fingerprinting algorithms
that take into account various features of the multimedia. It’s
very essential for an online multimedia marketplace to ensure
that each work gets uploaded only once. Cryptographic hash
functions such as MD5 and SHA can do this task efficiently
by comparing the new image hash with hashes of all images
on Blockchain and check for a match. But we go a step further
and also try to identify works that seem to be modifications
of the original works already present on the Blockchain and
are perceptually similar to these original works. For example
if someone tries to upload slightly rotated picture, say 12°
anticlockwise, then due to avalanche effect hashes such as
SHA will have totally different final hash. Instead if we use
perceptual hash, only some or none of the bits in final hash
will change. We can use this property of perceptual hashes to
find similarity between images. The way this is achieved is
by calculating dissimilarity between original image and test
image. To quantify dissimilarity, find perceptual hash of both
images and calculate hamming distance between thus obtained
hashes. Normalize this hamming distance between 0 and 1.
This is the measure of dissimilarity between original and test
images and is named NHD. If this dissimilarity is within a
certain threshold, test image will get rejected. But sometimes
two distinct and original images can also have near-similar
perceptual hashes, leading to small dissimilarity value. So the
critical task here is to find the threshold such that we can
identify between two distinct images and two perceptually
similar images as correctly as possible. We describe the
method to obtain threshold in the result section.
 Fig. 1. System architecture

There are many perceptual hashing algorithms, but we use four seen as penalty. Thus this financial penalty would discourage
most popular ones, namely phash (dct hash) ,difference hash, fraudulent behaviour.
average hash and wavelet hash. These algorithms are included
in ImageHash library in python where detailed documentation B. Smart contracts and Information flow
about these algorithms has been provided. So if someone
The information flow is shown in system architecture di-
uploads a tampered version of original image present on
agram in Figure 1. Smart contracts are at the heart of the
marketplace, smart contract will compute its perceptual hash,
Ethereum ecosystem. Smart contracts on Ethereum are little
compute hamming distance of this hash and hashes stored on
pieces of code that live on the Blockchain. The concept of
decentralised PERC HASH database and upon due comparing
smart contract was first introduced by Szabo [3]. They are
with threshold, will reject such image. Thus not only the
used to manage agreements between users. They can hold
fraudsters wouldn’t be able to upload such images, they will
Ether (ETH), release it to appropriate entity, hold information
also have paid transaction charges associated for processing
and provide utility to other smart contracts. Smart contracts
that transaction on the Ethereum network, which can be
are used to perform certain computations, store some variables
 Fig. 2. Images from left to right: classic image barbara, barbara rot5, barbara rot25, barbara rot90, barbara exp-50, barbara sat+50.
TABLE I
ACCEPTANCE RESULTS ON CLASSIC BARBARA IMAGE AND
Image WHASH (Hexadecimal)
barbara.png a938f9fad3120d0d
barbara rot5.png 383afafaf3120d14
barbara rot25.png 347476faf2da4608
barbara rot90.png ab1c03f37cf038b8
barbara exp-50.png a938f9fad3120d0d
barbara sat+50.png e938f9fa93120d0d
and trade digital goods while adhering to certain specified con-
ditions mentioned in the contract. Thus one can trade digital
assets over Ethereum network with self-defined conditions that
are specified in these contracts. Due to these qualities, they are
suitable for including image licensing and copyright protection
logic [12]. We use solidity [10] to write smart contracts, which
is by far the most popular language for writing smart contracts.
We follow best practices for creating such contracts [16] and
use lightweight algorithms such as wavelet hash (WHASH)
for providing copyright protection, thus requiring less gas
amount [13]. All our transactions pass through smart contracts.
We use smart contracts to calculate perceptual hashes, dis-
tribute encryption and decryption keys to appropriate entities,
connect with IPFS, check for copyright violation and accept
or reject images. After quantifying the image dissimilarity
between images present on marketplace and newly uploaded
image by calculating Normalized Hamming Distance (NHD),
smart contract rejects images that have NHD below a certain
threshold as can be seen from Table 2 and Figure 2. Here
WHASH is able to identify all transformations of classic
barbara image except 90° rotated version. For determining
acceptance or rejection of image, the threshold for WHASH is
taken as 0.379 as calculated in result section. This shows both
the level of effectiveness and reliability of perceptual hashes.
Perceptual hashes are able to detect tampering in the events
where modifications made to images are not too extreme and
there’s still good level of structural similarity between original
image and its tampered version.
IV. R ESULTS
We test our model on a dataset of natural images and the
transformations of these images for the purpose of evaluating
effectiveness of perceptual hashes in detection of copyright
violation. We use Berkeley Segmentation DataSet (BSDS)
[7], which is the dataset of 500 natural images. The effective
hashing algorithm for real life application would be the
one that can distinguish between two authentic images and
ITS TRANSFORMATIONS .
Hamming Distance Dissimilarity (NHD) Acceptance result
- - Accepted
10 0.156 Rejected
24 0.375 Rejected
30 0.469 Accepted
0 0.000 Rejected
2 0.031 Rejected
transformations of the same image.
We perform following transformations on each image
from BSDS-500 dataset:
• Rotation (in degrees): 5°, 10° ,15° ,20° ,25° (clockwise)
• Gamma correction: 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5
• Salt and pepper noise: 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, 0.20, 0.25, 0.30,
0.35, 0.40, 0.45, 0.50, 0.55, 0.60, 0.65, 0.70, 0.75, 0.80,
0.85, 0.90, 0.95, 1.00
• Crop (fixed aspect ratio mode): 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%,
25%
• Resize (size reduction - fixed aspect ratio mode): 5%,
10%, 15%, 20%, 25%
After these transformations, we end up with a total of
21500 images (500 original images and 42 transformations
of each original image). To evaluate effectiveness of hashing
algorithms, we create two cases:
Positive Case: The images falling in this case are manipu-
lated versions of the original image present on the marketplace.
We expect the hashing algorithms to detect such fraudulent
images and smart contract should reject them right away.
Negative Case: The images falling in this case are two
distinct original images from the dataset. The newly uploaded
distinct image should be allowed by the network to be added
on the marketplace for sale.
Hamming Distance is the number of different bits between
two hashes. Therefore the hamming distance carries with it
an implicit sense of dissimilarity. We calculate the hamming
distance between new image and all the previous images
uploaded on the Blockchain, normalize the distance value
and compare that to threshold in order to make a decision
whether to accept or reject the new image. This way new
image is checked against all images that are being traded on
the marketplace. We calculate Normalized Hamming Distance
(NHD) as follows:
Fig. 3. The effectiveness of a particular perceptual hashes to classify positive and negative cases correctly. Here X-axis refers to NHD and Y-axis refers to
fraction of total images.
HammingDistance
N HD =
HashBitsCount
All four hashing algorithms that we consider return 64 bits
hashes.
Following metrics are used to evaluate the quality of a
perceptual hash function:
Earth Movers Distance: Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) is a
measure of the distance between two probability distributions
over a region. EMD is based on minimum cost that must
be paid to transform one distribution into another [9]. Larger
value of EMD is desired.
Intersection-Over-Union: Intersection over Union (IoU) is
an evaluation metric used to measure the accuracy of an
object detector on a particular dataset. Smaller value of IoU
is desired.
Threshold: Threshold value is the magnitude if not
exceeded by the Normalized Hamming Distance (NHD), then
the image will get rejected. Therefore if NHD is greater than
threshold then dissimilarity is above the required value and
image gets accepted on the marketplace. To select an optimal
threshold, focus on Figure 3. When the negative case bar first
crosses the positive bar, the corresponding scaled distance
value is taken as threshold.
Figure 3 shows the graphical comparison of phash, dhash,
average hash and wavelet hash respectively. Here the X-axis
denotes hamming distance scaled between 0 to 1 while Y-
axis denotes the probability of image falling into positive or
negative case. We would prefer to use a perceptual hash-
 TABLE II
C OMPARISON OF EFFECTIVENESS OF VARIOUS PERCEPTUAL HASHES CALCULATED ON BSDS-500 DATASET
Metric PHASH
EARTH MOVER DISTANCE 0.322
INTERSECTION OVER UNION 0.276
THRESHOLD VALUE 0.353
ing algorithm that gives minimum overlap between positive
and negative case distributions. This can be calculated with
Intersection-Over-Union metric. We would prefer the algo-
rithm that has highest Earth Mover Distance between positive
and negative distributions.
As can be seen from Table 2, all four hashing algorithms
give comparable values on the metrics. Average hash and
Dhash have higher EMD values and average hash has the
least IoU value. The threshold for average hash comes out
to be 0.304. This means if the new image’s average hash has
more than 30.4% bits similar with average hash of an image
present on marketplace, then new image will be approved by
the network and added to marketplace.
The comparison of average time for hashing is as follows:
• PHASH: 33.97 ms
• DHASH: 29.93 ms
• AVG HASH: 29.81 ms
• WHASH: 60.99 ms
We’d like to point out that the the amount of time that it takes
to verify a new image is directly proportional to the number of
images that have been uploaded on the marketplace. In other
words, time complexity of new image verification is linear.
V. C ONCLUSION
We conclude that Blockchain based solution for online stock
photo marketplace provides many benefits over traditional
marketplaces such as high level of security, permanent record
of trade, custom licenses, custom selling price for image,
higher revenue for contributors and permits distributed storage
of images with the help of IPFS. Due to the absence of
central authority, the marketplace is free from censorship
and interference. After thorough evaluation, we conclude that
the perceptual hashes are effective and efficient copyright
infringement detection tools. The Blockchain transactions only
contain IPFS hashes for retrieving images. By encrypting
content beforehand in the smart contract with a choice of
an encryption scheme and then transferring data to IPFS,
information security is enforced. The smart contract releases
decryption keys only to appropriate buyer. Furthermore, our
implementation is scalable. Thus the paper illustrates a novel
use-case of a proven technology to help fight a deep rooted
malicious practice in the stock-photo world.
VI. L IMITATIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
Our system can detect fraudulent images that are per-
ceptually similar to original images to a reasonable extent.
While perceptual hashes are very effective in detecting many
DHASH WHASH AVG HASH
0.329 0.317 0.328
0.280 0.260 0.220
0.400 0.379 0.304
transformations, there are some cases for which hashing algo-
rithms fails to identify fraudulent image as we saw with 90°
rotated barbara image in Table 1. But in general, perceptual
hashes provide a great trade-off between accuracy and time
complexity.
We intend to work on the following tasks in the future:
In order to close loopholes such as one explained with
Figure 2 and Table 1, we need to study and employ more
robust and efficient Computer Vision techniques than percep-
tual hashes, if there are any.
Turning this Decentralised app (DApp) into full-fledged
Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) which could
also provide claim assistance, decentralised voting on claims,
rewards management and remuneration for copyright breach.
R EFERENCES
[1] G. Wood, ”Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction
ledger”, Ethereum Project Yellow Paper, 2014.
[2] S. Nakamoto, ”Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system”, White
paper, 2008.
[3] Nick Szabo, ”The idea of smart contracts,” 1997.
[4] Buterin V, ”A next-generation smart contract and decentralized applica-
tion platform”, White Paper, 2014.
[5] Juan Benet, ”IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System
(DRAFT 3)”. https://github.com/ipfs/papers, 2017.
[6] C. Zaunerm, ”Implementation and benchmarking of perceptual image
hash functions”, PhD thesis, University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg,
Austria, 2010.
[7] P. Arbelaez, M. Maire, C. Fowlkes and J. Malik, ”Contour Detection
and Hierarchical Image Segmentation”, IEEE TPAMI, Vol. 33, No. 5,
pp. 898-916, May 2011.
[8] V. Monga and B. L. Evans, ”Perceptual image hashing via feature
points: performance evaluation and tradeoffs”, Image Processing, IEEE
Transactions on, 15(11):34523465, 2006.
[9] R Ubner Y., Tomasi C., Andguibas L. J., ”The earth movers distance as
a metric for image retrieval”, Int. J. Comput. Vision 40, 99121, 2000.
[10] Christian Reitwiessner and Gavin Wood, ”Solidity”, White Paper, 2015.
[11] V. Buterin, ”On public and private blockchains”,
https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/07/on-public-and-private-
blockchains, 2015.
[12] V. Morabito, ”Smart contracts and licensing”, in Business Innovation
Through Blockchain, pp. 101-124, Springer, 2017.
[13] T. Chen, X. Li, X. Luo, and X. Zhang, ”Under-optimized smart contracts
devour your money”, in 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on
Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), pp. 442-446,
IEEE, 2017.
[14] A. Bogner, M. Chanson, and A. Meeuw, ”A decentralised sharing app
running a smart contract on the ethereum blockchain,” in Proceedings of
the 6th International Conference on the Internet of Things, pp. 177-178,
ACM, 2016.
[15] L. Luu, D.-H. Chu, H. Olickel, P. Saxena, and A. Hobor, ”Making
smart contracts smarter,” in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC
Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS ’16, pp.
254-269, ACM, 2016.
[16] K. Delmolino, M. Arnett, A. Kosba, A. Miller, and E. Shi, ”Step
by step towards creating a safe smart contract: Lessons and insights
from a cryptocurrency lab,” in International Conference on Financial
Cryptography and Data Security, pp. 79-94, Springer, 2016.