Anonymous camera for privacy protection

Privacy protection in the surveillance video data has received great attention. Although tremendous works have been proposed to provide effective privacy protection techniques, most of the algorithms are based on post-processing that deletes, obscures or encrypts the privacy information after privacy-included raw data are recorded. Consequently, they are vulnerable to raw data leak out, which may lead to unauthorized use. Therefore, it is imperative to develop a new privacy protection scheme which is capable of excluding any privacy information at the video recording phase. In this paper, we propose an anonymous camera aiming to protect the privacy of individuals at the video capturing phase by optical masking technique. It effectively reduces the risk of raw data leakage because no privacy information will be recorded by the camera. We implemented a prototype camera, which consists of an infrared camera, a RGB camera and a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) device. We introduce optical design and performance of the anonymous camera, the masking algorithm as well as the calibration methodology. Experimental results demonstrate that our prototype anonymous camera can perform accurate real time masking of the face for privacy protection.