Communications of the ACM
Video Privacy Tool Lets You Select What Others See
Computer scientists at Duke University have developed software that helps prevent inadvertent disclosure of trade secrets and other restricted information within a cameras field of view by letting users specify what others can see.
Credit: Duke Today
Researchers at Duke University have developed software that enables users to specify what others can see when sharing images captured by camera-equipped smartphones, laptops, and other devices.
One example of their approach is designed to protect sensitive information on two-dimensional surfaces such as whiteboards and computer presentation slides, while the other safeguards images of three-dimensional objects such as keyboards and faces. In both cases, users select the part of the scene they want to share by drawing a rectangular border around it, either by hand or with a mouse. Once the software knows what to look for, it intercepts all incoming frames from the video stream and scans frame by frame for a match using computer-vision technology. Only authorized objects pass from the camera to third-party software such as smartphone apps; the rest of the image is blocked out by default.
"The key challenges in designing these systems were to ensure that the marking process was easy for the users, and that detecting public regions did not slow down the camera output or the smartphone," says Duke professor Ashwin Machanavajjhala.
From Duke Today
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Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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