Hiding privacy information in video surveillance system

This paper proposes a detailed framework of storing privacy information in surveillance video as a watermark. Authorized personnel is not only removed from the surveillance video as in J. Wickramasuriya et al. (2004) but also embedded into the video itself, which can only be retrieved with a secrete key. A perceptual-model-based compressed domain video watermarking scheme is proposed to deal with the huge payload problem in the proposed surveillance system. A signature is also embedded into the header of the video as in M. Pramateftakis et al. (2004) for authentication. Simulation results have shown that the proposed algorithm can embed all the privacy information into the video without affecting its visual quality. As a result, the proposed video surveillance system can monitor the unauthorized persons in a restricted environment, protect the privacy of the authorized persons but, at the same time, allow the privacy information to be revealed in a secure and reliable way.