Preserving and Managing Privacy Information in Video Surveillance Systems

Recent widespread deployment and increased sophistication of video surveillance systems have raised apprehension of their threat to individuals’ right of privacy. Privacy protection technologies developed thus far have focused mostly on subject detection and visual obfuscation techniques. In this chapter, we discuss a prototype system for privacy-protected video surveillance that is capable of managing the privacy information so that it can authenticate, reverse the modification and retrieve the original content with appropriate permissions. In this context, a novel rate-distortion optimized datahiding scheme is proposed to embed the extracted private information inside the modified video itself rather than as a separate copy. While keeping the modified video standard-compliant, our data hiding scheme allows the privacy data to be retrieved with proper authentication. To maintain privacy, the authentication process to access the privacy data must be anonymous. For this purpose, we develop a novel privacy information management system that uses encrypted biometric signals for authentication and access control. Two secure protocols, one for privacy information encryption and the other for privacy information retrieval are proposed. Error control coding is used to cope with the variability in biometric signals and efficient implementation is achieved based on the use of surrogate data records.