Blockchain Asset Lifecycle Management for Visual Content Tracking

With the current complexification of image manipulation technologies (ranging from color editing or aspect ratio modifications to AI-generated fake news), many numerical representations can be connected to the same semantic visual content. Thus, ensuring trust and authenticity for tracking near-duplicated visual content (i.e., semantically identical yet digitally different content) becomes challenging from both methodological and technical points of view. Addressing these challenges requires the synergistic combination of methodological solutions from different research fields, while current solutions are heterogeneous and lack interoperability. In this paper, we create an automatic complete lifecycle management workflow for visual content assets represented on blockchains. The workflow is supported by a novel architecture seamlessly integrating near-duplicated content detection, Smart Contract automation, and token brokerage. The architecture leverages a load-balancing framework and near-duplicated content detection to grant properties natively featured by blockchains (security, trust, and transparency) to the authentication of assets in environments where the same semantic content has various digital representations. Subsequently, minted blockchain assets can be used contingently with other state-of-the-art tools, ensuring interoperability with blockchain working standards. The effectiveness of this workflow is demonstrated through open-source example implementations for the Ethereum and Tezos frameworks, illustrating the benefits this process brings to automatic asset generation and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management.