A novel eye region based privacy protection scheme

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel eye region scrambling scheme capable of protecting privacy sensitive eye region information present in video contents. The proposed system consists of an automatic eye detection module followed by a privacy enabling JPEG XR encoder module. An object detection method based on a probabilistic model of image generation is used in conjunction with a skin-tone segmentation to accurately locate eye regions in real time. The utilized JPEG XR encoder effectively deteriorate the visual quality of privacy sensitive eye region at low computational cost. Performance of proposed solution is validated using benchmark face recognition algorithms on face image database. Experimental results indicate that the proposed solution is able to conceal identity by preventing successful identification at low computational costs.