Towards a privacy aware information system for emergency response

Intelligent Systems in Smart Cities capture and exchange a large variety of information, for example, environmental data, location, biometric and personal data, health records, among others, in order to improve the quality of services. On one hand, such systems could represent an important, lifesaving resource for public services aimed at addressing emergency situations (e.g. firefighters, police), by providing access to a large amount of diverse information. On the other hand, they are also a threat with respect to data protection and privacy when disclosing all sort of personal and sensitive information. Since not all the information available can be used or helpful for handling the emergency we have the challenge of ensuring that the least possible amount of sensitive information is exchanged, therefore reducing the risk of unwanted disclosure and misuse. Thus, being aware and include a privacy-by design approach when managing personal and sensitive data is essential in the context of emergency systems. This work aims to analyse the privacy issues that Intelligent Systems face when sharing information with public services to attend emergency situations. By characterising these issues, we aim of informing the knowledge requirements for designing an Intelligent System that only allows valuable and helpful information to be exchanged, minimising personal and sensitive data disclosure

Region-Based Transform-Domain Video Scrambling

In this paper, we address the problem of scrambling regions of interest in a video sequence. We target applications such as video surveillance preserving privacy, anonymous video communications, or TV news safeguarding the anonymity of a source. We propose an efficient solution based on transform-domain scrambling. More specifically, the sign of selected transform coefficients is flipped during encoding. We address the two cases of Motion JPEG 2000 and MPEG-4. Simulation results show that it can be successfully applied to conceal information in regions of interest in the scene while providing with a good level of security. Furthermore, the scrambling is flexible and allows adjusting the amount of distortion introduced. Finally, this is achieved with a small impact on coding performance and negligible computational complexity increase

Privacy Enabling Technology for Video Surveillance

In this paper, we address the problem privacy in video surveillance. We propose an efficient solution based on transform-domain scrambling of regions of interest in a video sequence. More specifically, the sign of selected transform coefficients is flipped during encoding. We address more specifically the case of Motion JPEG 2000. Simulation results show that the technique can be successfully applied to conceal information in regions of interest in the scene while providing with a good level of security. Furthermore, the scrambling is flexible and allows adjusting the amount of distortion introduced. This is achieved with a small impact on coding performance and negligible computational complexity increase. In the proposed video surveillance system, heterogeneous clients can remotely access the system through the Internet or 2G/3G mobile phone network. Thanks to the inherently scalable Motion JPEG 2000 codestream, the server is able to adapt the resolution and bandwidth of the delivered video depending on the usage environment of the client

Smart video surveillance system preserving privacy

In this paper, we present a smart video surveillance system based on standard technologies and wired or wireless IP networking. The key novelty of the system is that it protects the privacy of people under surveillance. More specifically, a video analysis module detects regions of interest in the scene by change detection or face detection techniques. It is assumed that these regions contain private and sensitive information. Scrambling is then applied only to the corresponding regions. Furthermore, the amount of distortion can be controlled by restricting scrambling to some resolution levels. As a result, the scene remains visible, but privacy-sensitive information is unidentifiable. The scrambling is controlled by a private encryption key which is kept under control of legal authorities. The latter are therefore the only ones who can grant authorization to unlock the protection and view the whole scene. Therefore, this system successfully addresses the loss of privacy issue associated with video surveillance