Protecting and managing privacy information in video surveillance systems

Recent widespread deployment and increased sophistication of video surveillance systems have raised apprehension of their threat to individuals' right of privacy. Privacy protection technologies developed thus far have focused mainly on different visual obfuscation techniques but no comprehensive solution has yet been proposed. We describe a prototype system for privacy-protected video surveillance that advances the state-of-the-art in three different areas: First, after identifying the individuals whose privacy needs to be protected, a fast and effective video inpainting algorithm is applied to erase individuals' images as a means of privacy protection. Second, to authenticate this modification, a novel rate-distortion optimized data-hiding scheme is used to embed the extracted private information into the modified video. While keeping the modified video standard-compliant, our data hiding scheme allows the original data to be retrieved with proper authentication. Third, we view the original video as a private property of the individuals in it and develop a secure infrastructure similar to a Digital Rights Management system that allows individuals to selectively grant access to their privacy information.