QAIC: Quality-assured image crowdsourcing via blockchain and deep learning
Baowei Wang, Yi Yuan, Bin Li, Changyu Dai, Yufeng Wu, Weiqian Zheng · 2023
Recently, image crowdsourcing, a new trading mode, has been proposed to bridge the gap between the excess photos generated by intelligent devices and the great demand for images. However, traditional crowdsourcing methods often rely on centralized platforms, which risk data leakage and a single point of failure (SPOF). Moreover, due to the subjectivity of image quality assessment and the complexity of image data structure, image quality is difficult to control for traditional crowdsourcing frameworks without exposing data privacy. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based image crowdsourcing framework named QAIC to address these issues. Within the framework of QAIC, the transaction information is stored using a multichain structure, and the transaction process is implemented using smart contracts. We design an image selection and pricing mechanism for QAIC, where high-quality image sets can be spontaneously selected, and each image can be dynamically priced based on distortion degree and content relevance. Finally, to accurately obtain image quality, we design a dual output neural network model to evaluate the image quality, where a lightweight architecture is adopted, and piecewise outputs are designed to protect image privacy and reduce the on-chain computational cost Extensive analysis and experiments demonstrate that the quality of transaction data and reasonable pricing can be ensured using the QAIC without compromising image privacy.