CAAD Paper on Privacy Enhancement wins award

The conference PST 2006 was held in Markham/Toronto, Canada from 30th Oct to 1st Nov. The 2006 issue of the annual conference focused on bridging the gap between Priacy, Security and Trust technologies and business services. The submitted paper presents a multi-disciplinary approach on research in a privacy enhancement system for video surveilled spaces. With the goal to enable a person under video surveillance to control their privacy a system using technologies from computer vision, cryptography, building automation and interface design was created. The resulting system was examined from a technological and architectural point of view. Embedded in the blue-c-II project the collaborative research succeeded in applying latest results from the Computer Vision Lab in an architectural context.

From the papers abstract:

We present a system prototype for self-determination and
privacy enhancement in video surveilled areas by integrat-
ing computer vision and cryptographic techniques into net-
worked building automation systems. This paper describes
research work that has been done within the first half of the
collaborative blue-c-II project and is conducted by an inter-
disciplinary team of researchers. Persons in a video stream
control their visibility on a per-viewer base and can choose
to allow either the real view or an obscured image to be
seen. The parts of the video stream that show a person are
protected by an AES cipher and can be sent over untrusted
networks. Experimental results are presented by the exam-
ple of a meeting room scenario. The paper concludes with
remarks on the usability and encountered problems.

The conference slides, additional information, and example videos can be found at http://pivisa.ethz.ch/. The paper will later be published in the ACM digital library, the International Journal of Information Security (IJIS), and the Journal of Computer Security (JCS).