Chaos-cryptography based privacy preservation technique for video surveillance

A multimedia surveillance system aims to provide security and safety of people in a monitored space. However, due to the nature of surveillance, privacy-sensitive information such as face, gait, and other physical parameters based on the captured media from multiple sensors, can be revealed without the permission of the people who appear in the surveillance video. This is a major concern in recent days. Therefore, it is desirable to have such mechanism that can hide privacy-sensitive information as much as possible, yet supporting effective surveillance tasks. In this article, we propose a chaos cryptography based data scrambling approach that can be applied on selected regions of interest (ROIs) in video camera footage, which contains privacy-sensitive data. Our approach also supports multiple levels of abstraction of data hiding depending on the role of the authorized user. In order to evaluate the suitability of this approach, we applied our algorithm on some video camera footage and observed that our approach is computationally efficient and, hence, it can be applied for real-time video surveillance tasks in preserving privacy sensitive information.