Prime Techniques for Image Privacy Protection

Abstract

Provision of security to each and every individual all over the world is something which is to be considered seriously. For providing security different surveillance applications are used. While focusing on the provision of security, yet another crucial factor to be noted is the privacy of people. Every individual needs privacy. So to preserve privacy certain methods are introduced. The objective of image privacy protection is to provide the viewers with no information regarding the individual captured in a video. There are various methods for visual privacy protection prior to the method based on false colour. Masking, warping, blurring, scrambling, face de-identification algorithms and basic method based on false colours are used for providing visual privacy for the captured images during surveillance. All these methods focus on a particular region of the captured image and destroy intelligibility. Most of these methods do not offer individual privacy, security and reversibility. The proposed method consists of two schemes which are entirely different from the previous methods used. JPEG framework is used as the implementation basis. Both schemes, relay on false colours to attain privacy protection. The second scheme differs from the first by reducing the output size and encrypting the colour palette along with the usage of histogram of the input image. In certain situation, it would be very difficult to point out specific regions in a given image. As this recent method on false colours does not rely on regions in an image, it becomes user friendly. Also, this method helps in counting the number of people in a crowded area which is not offered by any prior methods. The experimental results indicate the favourability of false colour method over other commonly used solutions to protect visual privacy.

Keywords: Image processing, false colour, colour palette, surveillance, reversibility, intelligibility