MediaEval 2015 Drone Protect Task: Privacy Protection in Surveillance Systems Using False Coloring

This paper describes privacy protection method based on a false coloring approach for Drone Protect Task of MediaEval 2015. The aim is to obscure regions of a video that are privacy sensitive without sacrificing intelligibility and pleasantness. False coloring transforms the original colors of pixels using a color palette into a different set of colors in which private information is harder to recognize. The method can be applied globally to an entire frame of the video or to a specific region of interest (ROI). The privacy protected output is expected to remain pleasant, and when needed, a close approximation of the original input can be recovered. Benchmarking evaluations on the mini-drone dataset show promising results, especially, for intelligibility and pleasantness criteria.