VideoDP: A Flexible Platform for Video Analytics with Differential Privacy

• Main Authors: Wang Han, Xie Shangyu, Hong Yuan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sciendo 2020-10-01
• Series: Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
• Subjects: differential privacy; video privacy
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2020-0073

Massive amounts of videos are ubiquitously generated in personal devices and dedicated video recording facilities. Analyzing such data would be extremely beneficial in real world (e.g., urban traffic analysis). However, videos contain considerable sensitive information, such as human faces, identities and activities. Most of the existing video sanitization techniques simply obfuscate the video by detecting and blurring the region of interests (e.g., faces, vehicle plates, locations and timestamps). Unfortunately, privacy leakage in the blurred video cannot be effectively bounded, especially against unknown background knowledge. In this paper, to our best knowledge, we propose the first differentially private video analytics platform (VideoDP) which flexibly supports different video analyses with rigorous privacy guarantee. Given the input video, VideoDP randomly generates a utility-driven private video in which adding or removing any sensitive visual element (e.g., human, and object) does not significantly affect the output video. Then, different video analyses requested by untrusted video analysts can be flexibly performed over the sanitized video with differential privacy. Finally, we conduct experiments on real videos, and the experimental results demonstrate that VideoDP can generate accurate results for video analytics.