Towards privacy-aware photo sharing using mobile phones

Mobile phones are used these days to capture photos almost everyday everywhere. When photos are taken and shared among peers through social network sites or photo sharing portals, sometimes they pose threats to personal privacy of persons who appear in those photos, particularly when the person being photographed has reservation about sharing the same. In general, photos containing detectable human faces would be handled with care. In this paper, we propose techniques and develop a mobile app that can be used as an assistant tool in order to make people aware of their photo content. The app, integrated as a part of phone's builtin Camera app, categorically detects faces in an image preview and notify the user about detected faces (if any). The user then uses his/her rightful discretion to share or store the captured picture being respectful that no one's privacy is violated through this capture. Two possible techniques for detecting faces, namely cloud based and in-phone processing based, are proposed and a few experimental results with the app have been reported.