TrustEYE.M4: Protecting the sensor — Not the camera

Images captured in camera networks are potentially privacy sensitive and therefore need protection. A critical aspect is where protection is applied - after transmission at the data center or preferably already on the camera. In this work we take on-camera protection a step further and propose to make privacy protection and security inherent features of the image sensing unit. Already within the camera we realize strong separation between components that have access to raw image data and those that do not need raw data access. Our approach is based on the custom-designed TrustEYE.M4 prototype of a secure sensing unit. We demonstrate the feasibility of sensor-level privacy protection with a cartoon-like effect based on mean shift filtering.