Managing privacy data in pervasive camera networks

Privacy protection of visual information is increasingly important as pervasive camera networks becomes more prevalent. The proposed scheme addresses the problem of preserving and controlling of the privacy visual data through two innovations. First, unlike the existing centralized control of privacy data, the proposed system allows individual users to make the final decision on every access to their privacy data. As such, it offers a much stronger form of privacy protection as the user no longer needs to trust, adhere or register his/her privacy preferences with a server. The second innovation is the development of a secure reversible data hiding scheme for embedding all the ownership information and privacy data into the obfuscated video bitstream. Not only has it resulted in an efficient design of protocols, the reversible data hiding allows perfect reconstruction of original data and supports arbitrary types of video obfuscation techniques. Impact of data hiding on bitrate and distortion is minimized through a rate-distortion optimization procedure and experimental results are provided to demonstrate its efficiency.