A framework for the validation of privacy protection solutions in video surveillance

The issue of privacy protection in video surveillance has drawn a lot of interest lately. However, thorough performance analysis and validation is still lacking, especially regarding the fulfillment of privacy-related requirements. In this paper, we put forward a framework to assess the capacity of privacy protection solutions to hide distinguishing facial information and to conceal identity. We then conduct rigorous experiments to evaluate the performance of face recognition algorithms applied to images altered by privacy protection techniques. Results show the ineffectiveness of naïve privacy protection techniques such as pixelization and blur. Conversely, they demonstrate the effectiveness of more sophisticated scrambling techniques to foil face recognition.