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The PeopleVision
project is developing systems that understand human motion using video cameras.
One of the main systems that has been developed is the Smart Surveillance Engine—a
software system to automatically watch surveillance video, thereby automatically
detecting alert conditions such as abandoned objects or intrusion and creating
a rich, searchable "Smart Surveillance Index" that can be browsed
or queried to quickly find interesting events in stored data. The PeopleVision
project uses the same video-understanding software to deliver privacy-protecting
video surveillance. Video streams processed by the PeopleVision system are broken
up into component objects and recombined into a new video signal that contains
information important to surveillance tasks (such as where people are and what
they are doing) but hiding private information such as identity, race, age and
gender.
The system can be tailored to control the amount of information presented and
obscured, for instance hiding all activity outside of a certain region, or preventing
an observer from seeing other sensitive items such as documents or computer
monitors. The system can provide a further level of abstraction by calculating
statistics, for example by revealing only a count of the number of people present,
or the most frequently used path through a store. All the data in the system
can be encrypted, and access to each of the data streams is controlled by access
controls that specify which users are able to observe which components of a
video stream.
A typical installation might present identity-masked video to security guards
and selected statistics to anonymous users within an organization. Guards would
be able to override the system to observe unobscured live video data while an
incident is occurring, but such overrides would be logged to prevent abuse.
Unmanipulated, stored video data would only be available to security supervisors
and law enforcement officials.
IBM Research has also built a "PrivacyCamera", which implements some
of these ideas. The PrivacyCamera is a single device combining a camera and
a processor that implements video-understanding algorithms. With this device,
users are assured that the raw, privacy-intruding video never leaves the device
and that any derived surveillance information calculated is in encrypted form.
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