Towards Privacy Preserving Multimedia Surveillance System: A Secure Privacy Vault Design

Multimedia surveillance systems in this age are equipped with heterogeneous sensors such as cameras, motion sensors, sound sensors, and RFID in order to provide a sense of safety and security to the people. However, due to the potential of being exposed, many people are increasingly being reluctant to be electronically monitored and suffer from privacy loss. Therefore, it is desirable to have privacy preservation (i.e. hiding people´s face) mechanism in the surveillance system as best as possible without compromising usual surveillance tasks. This paper proposes the design of a secure privacy vault to conceal privacy-sensitive data obtained from different visual sensors. It also studies the different privacy leakage channels in the video surveillance context and shows how the proposed solution helps to mitigate the potential privacy leakage problems at different levels of the leakage channels. It is envisioned that the proposed approach will stand as an improved approach to privacy preservation in multimedia surveillance.