A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Surveillance Systems

The ability to visually track people present in the scene is essential for any surveillance system. However, the widespread deployment and increased advancement of video surveillance systems have raised awareness of privacy to the public, i.e., human identity in the videos. The existing indoor surveillance systems allow people to be watched remotely and recorded continuously but do not prevent any party from viewing activities and collecting personal visual information of people in the videos. Because of this problem, we propose a privacy-preserving framework to provide each user (e.g., parents) with a personalized video where the user see only selected target subjects (e.g., child, teacher, and intruder) while other faces are dynamically masked. The primary services in our framework consist of a video streaming service and a personalized service. The video streaming service is responsible for detecting, segmenting, recognizing, and masking face images of the human subjects in the video. Notably, it classifies human subjects into insider and outsider classes and then applies the de-identification (i.e., masking) to those in the insider class, including the target subjects. Subsequently, the personalized service receives the visual information (i.e., masked and unmasked faces) from the streaming service and processes it at the user's mobile device. The output is then a personalized video for each user. For security reasons, we require the surveillance videos stored in the cloud in an encrypted form. To ensure an individual remains anonymous in a group, we propose a dynamic masking approach to mask the human subjects in the video. Our framework can deliver both reliable visual privacy protection and video utility. For instance, users can have confidence that their target subjects are anonymized in other views. To utilize the personalized video, users can use analytics software installed on their mobile devices to analyze the activities of their target subjects.