Building Camera Enabled Intelligent Systems: Visual Privacy by Design Meets Social Interaction

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Building Camera Enabled Intelligent Systems: Visual Privacy by Design 
Meets Social Interaction"

by

Miss Jiayu SHU


Abstract:

In recent years, cameras become ubiquitous in smartphones, smart glasses, IoT 
devices, and surveillance systems. By capturing beyond what humans can see 
explicitly, camera has been playing an important role in building intelligent 
systems, enabling sophisticated applications such as augmented reality to 
facilitate people's lives, together with advances in the cloud and edge 
computing. However, while people are taking advantages of cameras, concerns on 
visual privacy invasion are raised inevitably. The ease of taking photos and 
recording videos, the various online social media networks, and the possibility 
of inferring private information using recognition techniques, result in 
negative reception to the increased amount of cameras from the public.

In this proposal, we build camera enabled intelligent mobile systems to enhance 
social interaction, and respect people's visual privacy at the same time. We 
first introduce Talk2Me, a social networking application that enables users to 
disseminate information in Device-to-Device fashion and view others' 
information in an augmented reality way. Talk2Me helps users initiate 
conversations and make new friends with others in the proximity. On the other 
hand, to solve visual privacy issues raised from pervasive mobile cameras, we 
propose interactive and context-aware visual privacy protection mechanisms, 
which use external markers, gestures, and pre-define context elements for 
people to express their privacy preferences. Moreover, we design a 
trigger-and-notification protocol to help recorders inform people of nearby 
camera use, and automatically identify people that request protection in images 
or videos based on fuzzy fingerprint. Evaluation results on implemented 
prototypes demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approaches.


Date:			Monday, 17 December 2018

Time:                  	4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:                  Room 2131B
                         (lift 19)

Committee Members:	Dr. Pan Hui (Supervisor)
 			Prof. James Kwok (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Gary Chan
 			Dr. Wei Wang


**** ALL are Welcome ****