Privacy modeling for video data publication

Video cameras are being extensively used in many applications. Huge amounts of video are being recorded and stored everyday by surveillance systems. Any proposed application of this data raises severe privacy concerns. An assessment of privacy loss is necessary before any potential application of the data. In traditional methods of privacy modeling, researchers have focused on explicit means of identity leakage like facial information, etc. However, other implicit inference channels through which individual´s an identity can be learned have not been considered. For example, an adversary can observe the behavior, look at the places visited and combine that with the temporal information to infer the identity of the person in the video. In this work, we thoroughly investigate privacy issues involved with the video data considering both implicit and explicit channels. We first establish an analogy with the statistical databases and then propose a model to calculate the privacy loss that might occur due to publication of the video data. The experimental results demonstrate the utility of the proposed model.