Mememage
Mememage gives creators sovereignty over their image data. A short identifier lives in the image's own pixels, in a bar two pixels tall, and points to a record the creator keeps wherever they choose. It works on any platform, survives recompression, re-uploads and screenshots, and needs no third-party authority: any certification comes from the creator's own key.
Technique
Survival and Validation
Survival
- Pixels, not metadata. Platforms strip metadata. The bar is in the image pixels and carries through uploads, re-encoding and screenshots.
- Compression. Tested to JPEG quality 50. Color bands are 8 pixels wide, matching JPEG's 8×8 blocks.
- Error correction. Reed-Solomon parity repairs up to 3 damaged bytes. A CRC-16 rejects bad reads.
- Resizing and cropping. On larger images the bits fill the width between the anchors evenly and both rows are identical. These bars decode after downscaling or a 1-pixel bottom crop.
Validation
- Integrity. The bar holds a SHA-256 hash of the record. An edited record no longer matches.
- Authorship. Optional Ed25519 signature from the creator's own key, with key rotation and revocation. No certificate authority.
- Identity. The record stores a thumbnail of the image. A perceptual-hash comparison catches a bar copied onto a different image.
- Privacy. On private chains, fields such as the generation recipe are encrypted with AES-256-GCM. The identifier and hash stay readable.
Demonstration
Open any image and drop it into the decoder to inspect its data.
