Fully reversible privacy region protection for cloud video surveillance

Privacy becomes one of the major concerns of cloud-based multimedia applications such as cloud video surveillance. Privacy protection of surveillance videos aims to protect privacy information without hampering normal processing tasks of the cloud. Privacy Region Protection only protects the privacy region while keeping the non-privacy region visually intact to facilitate processing in the cloud. However, full reversibility, i.e. The complete recovery of the original video which is critical to digital investigation and law enforcement has not been properly addressed in privacy region protection. In this paper, we introduce fully reversible privacy region protection into cloud video surveillance and propose a novel fully reversible privacy protection method for H.264/AVC compressed video. All the operations are performed in the compressed domain and avoid lossy re-encoding, so the original H.264/AVC compressed video can be fully recovered. To our best knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first fully reversible one for privacy region protection. Experimental results and performance comparison demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.