EFFICIENT SCRAMBLING OF REGIONS OF INTEREST IN AN IMAGE OR VIDEO TO PRESERVE PRIVACY

摘要

A video surveillance system is disclosed which addresses the issue of privacyrights and scrambles regions of interest in a scene in a video scene toprotect the privacy of human faces and objects captured by the system. Thevideo surveillance system is configured to identify persons and or objectscaptured in a region of interest of a video scene by various techniques, suchas detecting changes in a scene or by face detection. In accordance with animportant aspect of the invention regions of interest are automaticallyscrambled, for example, by way of a private encryption key, while the balanceof the video scene is left in tact and, is thus recognizable. Such region ofinterest scrambling provides distinct advantages over known code blockscrambling techniques. The entire video scenes are then compressed, by one ormore compression standards, such as JPEG 2000. In accordance with one aspectof the invention, the degree of scrambling can be controlled.