Blockchain and AI-Based Platform for Managing Lost and Found Items in Public Places

Abstract

Every day, innumerable items are lost and unclaimed in shopping malls, restaurants, airports, and other public places. While some lost and found systems exist, they are often non-automated, poorly structured, and vulnerable to data loss. We present a blockchain- and AI-based platform that integrates Internet of Things (IoT) for real-time tracking and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving verification. In this platform, users can report lost or found items, for which information hashes are generated and then stored on the blockchain to ensure immutability, transparency, and trust. Artificial intelligence is used to compare lost items with potential found items to reduce the complexity of searching. To evaluate the AI component, we used a transfer learning technique with pre-trained CNN models, namely ResNet50, VGG16, and MobileNetV3, on the Caltech-256 dataset filtered to 10 relevant classes (1,219 images), attaining 95.46% ±1.09% accuracy in 5-fold cross-validation for ResNet50 without augmentation, 93.99% ±3.44% on holdout test, and 94.54% ±3.29% under Gaussian blur for robustness. Feature embeddings yielded top-1 matching accuracy of 89.01% and top-5 of 95.60%, outperforming recent image-matching baselines in noisy real-world conditions while maintaining sub-0.0003 s inference time. These results establish a scalable, trustworthy global ecosystem for lost-and-found management