Adaptive transformation for robust privacy protection in video surveillance

Abstract

Privacy is a big concern in current video surveillance systems. Due to privacy issues, many strategic places remain unmonitored leading to security threats. The main problem with existing privacy protection methods is that they assume availability of accurate region of interest (RoI) detectors that can detect and hide the privacy sensitive regions such as faces. However, the current detectors are not fully reliable, leading to breaches in privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a privacy protection method that adopts adaptive data transformation involving the use of selective obfuscation and global operations to provide robust privacy even with unreliable detectors. Further, there are many implicit privacy leakage channels that have not been considered by researchers for privacy protection. We block both implicit and explicit channels of privacy leakage. Experimental results show that the proposed method incurs 38 less distortion of the information needed for surveillance in comparison to earlier methods of global transformation; while still providing near-zero privacy loss. Copyright © 2012 Mukesh Saini et al.