Lightweight Image Segmentation Based Consensus Mechanism

Consensus mechanism is a fundamental technology of blockchain, ensuring the stability. The most popular consensus mechanism is proof-of-work mechanism. It attracts massive nodes through the distributed network and requires the nodes to generate nonces and hash them to accumulate workload. However, most of the generated nonces and hash values are meaningless and discarded. Such massive quantity of computational power are dedicated for nothing, which proves that the power are not used in an effective way. Thus, this paper proposes a neoteric MDL criterion of image segmentation based on an efficient chain code with Huffman coding and a novel consensus mechanism for blockchain using image segmentation with the proposed MDL criterion as the procedure of accumulating workload and generating nonces. The innovation points of this paper are: (a) it proposes a novel minimum description length model of pictures, which is applied to filtering the best segmentation of a picture; (b) it consummates the consensus mechanism with an image segmentation technology to replace the workload accumulating process, allowing nodes to segment images while mining blocks. The experimental results verified that blockchain nodes can segment images while mining blocks with this novel consensus mechanism, which makes full use of computational power.