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

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "Building Intelligent Mobile Camera 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 seeing the physical world and capturing 
beyond what humans can see explicitly, camera has been playing an important 
role in building intelligent systems and applications such as augmented 
reality to facilitate people’s daily lives, together with the advances in 
computer vision and mobile computing. While cameras bring people great 
convenience, concerns on visual privacy invasion are raised at the same time. 
Due to the ease of taking photos and recording videos, the popularity of online 
social media networks, and the possibility of inferring private information 
from images and videos using recognition techniques, people’s attitudes 
towards the increased amount of cameras are not completely positive.

In this thesis, we build intelligent mobile camera systems to enhance social 
interaction and bystander visual privacy. We first introduce Talk2Me, a mobile 
social network framework that helps users initiate conversations and make new 
friends with others in the proximity. Users of Talk2Me can share information 
with nearby users in Device-to -Device fashion and view others’ information in 
an augmented reality way. On the other hand, to solve visual privacy issues 
raised from pervasive mobile cameras, we first propose a visual 
indicator-based approach for people to control their visual privacy by wearing 
tags or showing hand gestures. We also design a beacon-based visual privacy 
protection solution that enables recorders to inform nearby bystanders of 
camera use and receive privacy preferences form bystanders following a 
trigger-and-notification protocol. Finally, we propose Cardea, a context-aware 
visual privacy protection mechanism that protects bystander visual privacy in 
photos according to users’ context-dependent privacy preferences. We build 
prototypes on smartphones. The evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility 
and effectiveness of our systems.


Date:			Tuesday, 9 July 2019

Time:			10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:			Room 3494
 			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. Ross Murch (ECE)

Committee Members:	Prof. Pan Hui (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Gary Chan
 			Prof. Huamin Qu
 			Prof. Ravindra Goonetilleke (ISD)
 			Prof. Dah-Ming Chiu (CUHK)


**** ALL are Welcome ****