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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
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Tools for Protecting the Privacy of Specific Individuals in Video

EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing volume 2007, Article number: 075427 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

This paper presents a system for protecting the privacy of specific individuals in video recordings. We address the following two problems: automatic people identification with limited labeled data, and human body obscuring with preserved structure and motion information. In order to address the first problem, we propose a new discriminative learning algorithm to improve people identification accuracy using limited training data labeled from the original video and imperfect pairwise constraints labeled from face obscured video data. We employ a robust face detection and tracking algorithm to obscure human faces in the video. Our experiments in a nursing home environment show that the system can obtain a high accuracy of people identification using limited labeled data and noisy pairwise constraints. The study result indicates that human subjects can perform reasonably well in labeling pairwise constraints with the face masked data. For the second problem, we propose a novel method of body obscuring, which removes the appearance information of the people while preserving rich structure and motion information. The proposed approach provides a way to minimize the risk of exposing the identities of the protected people while maximizing the use of the captured data for activity/behavior analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Datong Chen, Yi Chang, Rong Yan & Jie Yang

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  1. Datong Chen
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  2. Yi Chang
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Correspondence to Datong Chen.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://doi.org/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Chen, D., Chang, Y., Yan, R. et al. Tools for Protecting the Privacy of Specific Individuals in Video. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2007, 075427 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/75427

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/75427

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