Pimo: memory-efficient privacy protection in video streaming and analytics

Video streaming from cameras to backend cloud or edge servers for neural-based analytics has gained significant popularity. However, the transmission of data from cameras to a backend raises substantial privacy concerns, particularly regarding sensitive information like facial data. To offer privacy protection, visual processing techniques, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have been employed on cameras to blur and safeguard such data intelligently. However, these techniques frequently face memory challenges, particularly when dealing with high-resolution videos. In this paper, we propose PIMO, a memory-efficient visual privacy protection scheme designed to effectively blur video content leveraging adaptive slicing of frames and resolution degradation. Our extensive experimental evaluations validate that PIMO’s adaptive mechanism proficiently navigates fluctuating memory constraints. Furthermore, utilizing a content-based blur scheme, our approach can maintain an impressive mean precision of 95.2%, as compared to the original, non-blurred images.