CARDEA: A CONTEXT-AWARE AND INTERACTIVE VISUAL PRIVACY CONTROL FRAMEWORK

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "CARDEA: A CONTEXT-AWARE AND INTERACTIVE VISUAL PRIVACY CONTROL 
FRAMEWORK"

By

Mr. Rui ZHENG


Abstract

The growing popularity of mobile and wearable devices with builtin cameras, the 
bright prospect of camera related applications such as augmented reality and 
lifelogging system, the increased ease of taking and sharing photos, along with 
advances in computer vision techniques, have greatly facilitated peoples lives 
in many aspects, but inevitably raised peoples concerns about visual privacy at 
the same time.

Motivated by the finding that peoples privacy concerns are influenced by the 
context, in this thesis, we propose Cardea, a context–aware and interactive 
visual privacy control framework that enforces privacy policies according to 
peoples privacy preferences. The framework provides people with finegrained 
visual privacy control using: i) personal privacy profiles, with which people 
can define their context–dependent privacy preferences; ii) natural visual 
indicators: face features, for devices to automatically locate individuals who 
request privacy protection; iii) hand gestures, for people to temporarily 
update and flexibly inform cameras of their privacy preferences. Benefited from 
recent progresses in face and object recognition, Cardea offers a way for 
context–dependent privacy control in a natural and flexible manner, which 
differs from tag and marker based systems. We design and implement the 
framework consisting of Android client app and cloud control server, with 
convolutional neural networks as core of the image processing module. Our 
evaluation results confirm such framework is practical and effective, showing 
promising future for context–aware visual privacy control on mobile and 
wearable devices.


Date:			Wednesday, 26 October 2016

Time:			1:00pm - 3:00pm

Venue:			Room 1504
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Pan Hui (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Chi-Keung Tang (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Dit-Yan Yeung


**** ALL are Welcome ****