SCVS: On AI and Edge Clouds Enabled Privacy-preserved Smart-city Video Surveillance Services

Video surveillance systems are increasingly becoming common in many private and public campuses, city buildings, and facilities. They provide many useful smart campus/city monitoring and management services based on data captured from video sensors. However, the video surveillance services may also breach personally identifiable information, especially human face images being monitored; therefore, it may potentially violate the privacy of human subjects involved. To address this privacy issue, we introduced a large-scale distributed video surveillance service model, called Smart-city Video Surveillance (SCVS). SCVS is a video surveillance data collection and processing platform to identify important events, monitor, protect, and make decisions for smart campus/city applications. In this article, the specific research focus is on how to identify and anonymize human faces in a distributed edge cloud computing infrastructure.

To preserve the privacy of data during video anonymization, SCVS utilizes a two-step approach: (i) parameter server-based distributed machine learning solution, which ensures that edge nodes can exchange parameters for machine learning-based training. Since the dataset is not located on a centralized location, the data privacy and ownership are protected and preserved. (ii) To improve the machine learning model’s accuracy, we presented an asynchronous training approach to protect data and model privacy for both data owners and data users, respectively. SCVS adopts an in-memory encryption approach, where edge computing nodes collect and process data in the memory of edge nodes in encrypted form. This approach can effectively prevent honest but curious attacks. The performance evaluation shows the presented privacy protection platform is efficient and effective compared to traditional centralized computing models as presented in Section 5.