Efficient Scrambling Of Regions Of Interest In An Image Or Video To Preserve Privacy

• US 20080117295A1
• Filed: 12/22/2005
• Published: 05/22/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 12/27/2004
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Emitall Surveillance S.A.
• Original Assignee: Emitall Surveillance S.A.
• Inventors: Ebrahimi, Touradj, Dufaux, Frederic A.
• Application Number:
  US11/722,755
• Publication Number:
  US 20080117295A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 348/143
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 20/52 Surveillance or monitoring of activities, e.g. for recognising suspicious objects recognising microscopic objects G06V20/69
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 13/19604 involving reference image or background adaptation with time to compensate for changing conditions, e.g. reference image update on detection of light level change
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 13/19667 Details realated to data compression, encryption or encoding, e.g. resolution modes for reducing data volume to lower transmission bandwidth or memory requirements
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 13/19671 Addition of non-video data, i.e. metadata, to video stream
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 13/19684 Portable terminal, e.g. mobile phone, used for viewing video remotely
• CPC Class Codes: G08B 13/19686 Interfaces masking personal details for privacy, e.g. blurring faces, vehicle license plates

Abstract

A video surveillance system is disclosed which addresses the issue of privacy rights and scrambles regions of interest in a scene in a video scene to protect the privacy of human faces and objects captured by the system. The video surveillance system is configured to identify persons and or objects captured in a region of interest of a video scene by various techniques, such as detecting changes in a scene or by face detection. In accordance with an important aspect of the invention regions of interest are automatically scrambled, for example, by way of a private encryption key, while the balance of the video scene is left in tact and is thus recognizable. Such region of interest scrambling provides distinct advantages over known code block scrambling techniques. The entire video scenes are then compressed, by one or more compression standards, such as JPEG 2000. In accordance with one aspect of the invention, the degree of scrambling can be controlled.

Claims

1. A smart video surveillance system comprising:

at least one video surveillance system including a video surveillance camera system for capturing video scenes defining captured video scenes and a server for storing and processing said captured video scenes;

the video surveillance system configured to capture analyze said captured video scenes and identify regions of interest within said video scenes, and scramble said regions of interest within said captured video scenes in a manner in which only the region of interest is scrambled and which allows said video scenes including the scrambled content to be played back by way of a standard decoder.

2. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 1, wherein said video surveillance system is further configured to enable the degree to which the regions of interest are scrambled is user selectable.

3. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 1, wherein said video surveillance system is configured to automatically detect scene changes.

4. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 1, wherein said video surveillance system is configured to automatically detect human faces.

5. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 1, wherein said video surveillance system includes a system for compressing said captured video scenes.

6. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 1, wherein said video surveillance system is configured to scramble said region of interest using standard region of interest (ROI) coding techniques.

7. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 1, wherein said standard coding technique is JPEG 2000.

8. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said video surveillance system is configured to scramble using a predetermined code block size.

9. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said predetermined code block size is 8×

8.

10. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said predetermined code block size is 16×

16

11. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said predetermined code block size is 32×

32.

12. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said wherein said video surveillance system is configured to scramble using a predetermined user selectable scrambling co-efficient.

13. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said wherein said video surveillance system is configured to scramble using an explicit approach for region of interest encoding.

14. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said wherein said video surveillance system is configured to scramble using an implicit approach for region of interest encoding.

15. The smart video surveillance system as recited in claim 7, wherein said wherein said explicit approach for region of interest encoding causes a psuedo random noise sequence to be added to the code stream corresponding to the regions of interest such that said regions of interest can only be unscrambled by authorized users which have said psuedo random noise sequence.