Table Recognition for Sensitive Data Perception in an IoT Vision Environment

• Main Authors: Jin Zhang, Yanmiao Xie, Weilai Liu, Xiaoli Gong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-10-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: iot photographing leakage; sensitive data security; directional connected chain; table recognition; table recognition metrics
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/19/4162

Internet of Things (IoT) technology allows us to measure, compute, and decide about the physical world around us in a quantitative and intelligent way. It makes all kinds of intelligent IoT devices popular. We are continually perceived and recorded by intelligent IoT devices, especially vision devices such as cameras and mobile phones. However, a series of security issues have arisen in recent years. Sensitive data leakage is the most typical and harmful one. Whether we are just browsing files unintentionally in sight of high-definition (HD) security cameras, or internal ghosts are using mobile phones to photograph secret files, it causes sensitive data to be captured by intelligent IoT vision devices, resulting in irreparable damage. Although the risk of sensitive data diffusion can be reduced by optical character recognition (OCR)-based packet filtering, it is difficult to use it with sensitive data presented in table form. This is because table images captured by the intelligent IoT vision device face issues of perspective transformation, and interferences of circular stamps and irregular handwritten signatures. Therefore, a table-recognition algorithm based on a directional connected chain is proposed in this paper to solve the problem of identifying sensitive table data captured by intelligent IoT vision devices. First, a Directional Connected Chain (DCC) search algorithm is proposed for line detection. Then, valid line mergence and invalid line removal is performed for the searched DCCs to detect the table frame, to filter the irregular interferences. Finally, an inverse perspective transformation algorithm is used to restore the table after perspective transformation. Experiments show that our proposed algorithm can achieve accuracy of at least 92%, and filter stamp interference completely.