Video Manipulation Techniques for the Protection of Privacy in Remote Presence Systems

Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user sees. Through two user studies, we explore the effectiveness of different video manipulation techniques at providing different types of privacy. We simultaneously examine task performance in the presence of privacy protection. In the first study, participants were asked to watch a video captured by a robot exploring an office environment and to complete a series of observational tasks under differing video manipulation conditions. Our results show that using manipulations of the video stream can lead to fewer privacy violations for different privacy types. Through a second user study, it was demonstrated that these privacy-protecting techniques were effective without diminishing the task performance of the remote user.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Pembentukan Pola Desain Motif Karawo Gorontalo Menggunakan K-Means Color Quantization dan Structured Forest Edge Detecion

Sulaman Karawo merupakan kerajinan tangan berupa sulaman khas dari daerah Gorontalo. Motif sulaman diterapkan secara detail berdasarkan suatu pola desain tertentu. Pola desain digambarkan pada kertas dengan berbagai panduannya. Gambar yang diterapkan pada pola memiliki resolusi sangat rendah dan harus mempertahankan bentuknya. Penelitian ini mengembangkan metode pembentukan pola desain motif Karawo dari citra digital. Proses dilakukan dengan pengolahan awal menggunakan k-means color quantization (KMCQ) dan deteksi tepi structured forest. Proses selanjutnya melakukan pengurangan resolusi menggunakan metode pixelation dan binarization. Luaran dari algoritma menghasilkan 3 citra berbeda dengan ukuran yang sama, yaitu: citra tepi, citra biner, dan citra berwarna. Ketiga citra tersebut selanjutnya dilakukan proses pembentukan pola desain motif Karawo dengan berbagai petunjuk pola bagi pengrajin. Hasil menunjukkan bahwa pola desain motif dapat digunakan dan dimengerti oleh para pengrajin dalam menerapkannya di sulaman Karawo. Pengujian nilai-nilai parameter dilakukan pada metode k-means, gaussian filter, pixelation, dan binarization. Parameter-parameter tersebut yaitu: k pada k-means, kernel pada gaussian filter, lebar piksel pada pixelation, dan nilai threshold pada binarization. Pengujian menunjukkan nilai terendah tiap parameter adalah k=4, kernel=3x3, lebar piksel=70, dan threshold=20. Hasil memperlihatkan makin tinggi nilai-nilai tersebut maka semakin baik pola desain motif yang dihasilkan. Nilai-nilai tersebut merupakan nilai parameter terendah dalam pembentukan pola desain motif berkualitas baik berdasarkan indikator-indikator dari desainer. AbstractKarawo embroidery is a unique handicraft from Gorontalo. The embroidery motif is applied in detail based on a certain design pattern. These patterns are depicted on paper with various guides. The image applied to the pattern is very low resolution and retains its shape. This study develops a method to generate a Karawo design pattern from a digital image. The process begins by using k-means color quantization (KMCQ) to reduce the number of colors and edge detection of the structured forest. The next process is to change the resolution using pixelation and binarization methods. The output algorithm produces 3 different state images of the same size, which are: edge image, binary image, and color image. These images are used in the formation of the Karawo motif design pattern. The motif contains various pattern instructions for the craftsman. The results show that it can be used and understood by the craftsmen in its application in Karawo embroidery. Testing parameter values on the k-means method, Gaussian filter, pixelation, and binarization. These parameters are k on KMCQ, the kernel on a gaussian filter, pixel width in pixelation, and threshold value in binarization. The results show that the lowest value of each parameter is k=4, kernel=3x3, pixel width=70, and threshold=20. The results show that the higher these values, the better the results of the pattern design motif. Those values are the lower input to generate a good quality pattern design based on the designer’s indicators

Img2Logo:Generating Golden Ratio Logos from Images

Logos are one of the most important graphic design forms that use an abstracted shape to clearly represent the spirit of a community. Among various styles of abstraction, a particular golden-ratio design is frequently employed by designers to create a concise and regular logo. In this context, designers utilize a set of circular arcs with golden ratios (i.e., all arcs are taken from circles whose radii form a geometric series based on the golden ratio) as the design elements to manually approximate a target shape. This error-prone process requires a large amount of time and effort, posing a significant challenge for design space exploration. In this work, we present a novel computational framework that can automatically generate golden ratio logo abstractions from an input image. Our framework is based on a set of carefully identified design principles and a constrained optimization formulation respecting these principles. We also propose a progressive approach that can efficiently solve the optimization problem, resulting in a sequence of abstractions that approximate the input at decreasing levels of detail. We evaluate our work by testing on images with different formats including real photos, clip arts, and line drawings. We also extensively validate the key components and compare our results with manual results by designers to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Moreover, our framework can largely benefit design space exploration via easy specification of design parameters such as abstraction levels, golden circle sizes, etc

Make your own sprites: Aliasing-aware and cell-controllable pixelization

Pixel art is a unique art style with the appearance of low resolution images. In this paper, we propose a data-driven pixelization method that can pro- duce sharp and crisp cell effects with controllable cell sizes. Our approach overcomes the limitation of existing learning-based methods in cell size control by introducing a reference pixel art to explicitly regularize the cell structure. In particular, the cell structure features of the reference pixel art are used as an auxiliary input for the pixelization process, and for measuring the style similarity between the generated result and the reference pixel art. Furthermore, we disentangle the pixelization process into specific cell-aware and aliasing-aware stages, mitigating the ambiguities in joint learning of cell size, aliasing effect, and color assignment. To train our model, we construct a dedicated pixel art dataset and augment it with different cell sizes and different degrees of anti-aliasing effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance over state-of-the-arts in terms of cell sharpness and perceptual expressiveness. We also show promising results of video game pixelization for the first time. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/WuZongWei6/Pixelization

Segmentation-guided privacy preservation in visual surveillance monitoring

Treballs Finals de Grau d'Enginyeria Informàtica, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2022, Director: Sergio Escalera Guerrero, Zenjie Li i Kamal Nasrollahi[en] Video surveillance has become a necessity to ensure safety and security. Today, with the advancement of technology, video surveillance has become more accessible and widely available. Furthermore, it can be useful in an enormous amount of applications and situations. For instance, it can be useful in ensuring public safety by preventing vandalism, robbery, and shoplifting. The same applies to more intimate situations, like home monitoring to detect unusual behavior of residents or in similar situations like hospitals and assisted living facilities. Thus, cameras are installed in public places like malls, metro stations, and on-roads for traffic control, as well as in sensitive settings like hospitals, embassies, and private homes. Video surveillance has always been as- sociated with the loss of privacy. Therefore, we developed a real-time visualization of privacy-protected video surveillance data by applying a segmentation mask to protect privacy while still being able to identify existing risk behaviors. This replaces existing privacy safeguards such as blanking, masking, pixelation, blurring, and scrambling. As we want to protect human personal data that are visual such as appearance, physical information, clothing, skin, eye and hair color, and facial gestures. Our main aim of this work is to analyze and compare the most successful deep-learning-based state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation. In this study, we perform an efficiency-accuracy comparison to determine which segmentation methods yield accurate segmentation results while performing at the speed and execution required for real-life application scenarios. Furthermore, we also provide a modified dataset made from a combination of three existing datasets, COCO_stuff164K, PASCAL VOC 2012, and ADE20K, to make our comparison fair and generate privacyprotecting human segmentation masks

Using RGB colour combination in coloured quick response (QR) code algorithm to enhance QR code capacity

A Quick Response (QR) Code is a two-dimensional barcode that stores characters and can be read by any smartphone camera. The QR code has the capability to encode various data formats and languages; nevertheless, existing black and white QR code offers limited data storage. Even though there exist research on coloured QR Code to increase the storage capacity, requirement for larger data capacity by end user keep increasing. Hence, this thesis proposes a coloured QR Code algorithm which utilizes RGB colour combination to allow a larger data storage. The proposed algorithm integrates the use of compression, multiplexing, and multilayer techniques in encoding and decoding the QR code. Furthermore, it also introduces a partial encoding/decoding algorithm that allows the stored data to be manipulated. The algorithm that includes encoding and decoding processes is based on the red, green, and blue (RGB) colour techniques, which are used to create high capacity coloured QR code. This is realised in the experiments that store American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters. The ASCII text characters are used as an input and performance is measured by the number of characters that can be stored in a single black and white QR code version 40 (i.e. the benchmark) and also the coloured QR code. Other experiment metrics include percentage of missing characters, number of produced QR code, and elapsed time to create the QR code. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm stores 29 times more characters than the black and white QR code and 9 times more than other coloured QR code. Hence, this shows that the coloured QR Code has the potential of becoming a useful mini-data storage as it does not rely on internet connection

Pixelated Interactions: Exploring Pixel Art for Graphical Primitives on a Pin Array Tactile Display

Two-dimensional pin array displays enable access to tactile graphics that are important for the education of students with visual impairments. Due to their prohibitive cost and limited access, there is limited research within HCI and the rules to design graphics on these low-resolution tactile displays are unclear. In this paper, eight tactile readers with visual impairments qualitatively evaluate the implementation of Pixel Art to create tactile graphical primitives on a pin array display. Every pin of the pin array is assumed to be a pixel on a pixel grid. Our findings suggest that Pixel Art tactile graphics on a pin array are clear and comprehensible to tactile readers, positively confirming its use to design basic tactile shapes and line segments. The guidelines provide a consistent framework to create tactile media which implies that they can be used to downsize basic shapes for refreshable pin-array displays