Demo: A Prototype Vision Sensor for Real-time Focal-plane Obfuscation through Tunable Pixelation

Abstract

Privacy concerns are hindering the introduction of smart camera networks in prospective application scenarios like retail analytics, factory monitoring or elderly care. The idea of networked cameras pervasively collecting data gen- erates social rejection in the face of sensitive information being tampered by hackers or misused by legitimate users. New strategies must be developed in order to ensure pri- vacy from the very point where sensitive data are generated: the sensors. Protection measures embedded on-chip at the front-end sensor of each network node signi cantly reduce the number of trusted system components as well as the im- pact of potential software aws. In this demonstration, we present a full-custom QVGA vision sensor that can be re- con gured to implement programmable pixelation of image regions at the focal plane. In particular, we show on-the- y focal-plane face obfuscation supported by the Viola-Jones frontal face detector provided by OpenCV