A Copyright-Preserving and Fair Image Trading Scheme Based on Blockchain

With the proliferation of the Internet, particularly the rise of social media, digital images have gradually become an important part of life, and trading platforms have emerged for buying and selling images. However, traditional image trading service providers may disclose users’ private information for profit. Additionally, many image trading platforms disregard the fairness of a transaction and the issue of copyright protection after an image is sold. This neglect harms the interests of users and affects their enthusiasm for trading. A secure way to safely transact images is needed. We proposed a copyright-preserving and fair image trading scheme based on blockchain, which combines amplifying locality-sensitive hashing with searchable symmetric encryption to achieve safe image retrieval on blockchain and ensure the credibility of the image retrieval process. Additionally, we use digital fingerprint and watermark technologies to realize the copyright protection of images and use smart contracts to achieve fair transaction processes. The experimental results show that our scheme can protect image copyrights and realize a fair trading process while ensuring efficiency.