Subjective study of privacy filters in video surveillance

Extensive adoption of video surveillance, affecting many aspects of the daily life, alarms the concerned public about the increasing invasion into personal privacy. Therefore, to address privacy issues, many tools have been proposed for protection of personal privacy in image and video. However, little is understood regarding the effectiveness of such tools and especially their impact on the underlying surveillance tasks. In this paper, we propose a subjective evaluation methodology to analyze the tradeoff between the preservation of privacy offered by these tools and the intelligibility of activities under video surveillance. As an example, the proposed method is used to compare several commonly employed privacy protection techniques, such as blurring, pixelization, and masking applied to indoor surveillance video. The results show that, for the test material under analysis, the pixelization filter provides the best performance in terms of balance between privacy protection and intelligibility.