A New Concept of Security Camera Monitoring with Privacy Protection by Masking Moving Objects

We present a novel framework for encoding images obtained by a security monitoring camera with protecting the privacy of moving objects in the images. We are motivated by the fact that although security monitoring cameras can deter crimes, they may infringe the privacy of those who and objects which are recorded by the cameras. Moving objects, whose privacy should be protected, in an input image (recorded by a monitoring camera) are encrypted and hidden in a JPEG bitstream. Therefore, a normal JPEG viewer generates a masked image, where the moving objects are unrecognizable or completely invisible. Only a special viewer with a password can reconstruct the original recording. Data hiding is achieved by watermarking and encrypting with the advanced encryption standard (AES). We illustrate a concept of our framework and an algorithm of the encoder and the special viewer. Moreover, we show an implementation example.