Privacy-preserving with Flexible Autoencoder for Video Coding for Machines

The dataset for Video Coding for Machines (VCM) contains sensitive information that requires privacy preservation to address vulnerabilities. Achieving a balance to protect this sensitive data while maintaining VCM performance is crucial. We introduce an autoencoder integrated with a deep learning network that utilizes the ResNet architecture. This design blurs private details while preserving the contours, offering a high-dimensional representation that upholds privacy and VCM performance. The division position between the encoder and decoder is critical, influencing the equilibrium between compression efficacy and machine task performance. We craft a flexible, position-adjustable setting for the autoencoder to optimize this, facilitating a harmonious trade-off between bitrate and mAP across various deep-learning networks. This adaptation demonstrates superior performance relative to existing models. With FasterRCNN, our methods achieve 62.3 of mAP and 5681.29 of bitrate, and their versatility is further validated using YoloV5 and SSD.