Chain-Visage: Blockchain-Assisted Visual Content Ownership and Tamper Tracing in CIoT Multimedia Ecosystems

With the rapid proliferation of smart home cameras, wearable vision devices, and user-generated Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) content, ensuring visual media authenticity, rightful ownership, and tamper detection has become increasingly challenging. We propose Chain-Visage, a blockchain-assisted framework for secure content authentication and tamper tracing in decentralized CIoT multimedia ecosystems. The term Chain reflects the consortium blockchain backbone that guarantees immutable provenance, decentralized ownership management, and copyright revocation, while Visage symbolizes the unique visual identity of multimedia content achieved through dual-stage visual hash embedding. The proposed framework integrates Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving ownership verification and employs optimized smart contracts to manage visual rights, provenance records, and ownership transfers efficiently. Evaluations on a large-scale dataset of over 10,000 real-world images and 3,850 video clips from diverse CIoT devices demonstrate Chain-Visage’s superior performance, achieving 97.5% traceability accuracy, 93% tamper detection sensitivity, and low verification latency even under resource-constrained environments. This work addresses a critical research gap in secure, privacy-preserving, and energy-efficient multimedia ownership control and tamper-resilient content authentication for next-generation CIoT ecosystems.