SmartDoc: A Blockchain and AI-Integrated Framework for Secure Document Verification

Document fraud has emerged as one of the most persistent and damaging challenges facing academic institutions, government bodies, and corporate organizations worldwide. This paper presents SmartDoc, a web-based document management and verification system that combines Ethereum blockchain technology, the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and artificial intelligence-based optical character recognition (OCR) to automate the complete lifecycle of official document issuance and verification. The system stores cryptographic SHA-256 hashes of all issued documents on an immutable blockchain registry, ensures persistent document availability through decentralized storage, and applies OCR-based field extraction to validate document content against authoritative institutional records. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that SmartDoc successfully detects tampered documents in all test cases and reduces verification time from days to under ten seconds.