A steganography approach for hiding privacy in video surveillance systems

Abstract In today's environment, video surveillance systems have become widely used in almost all facilities, either public or private. At any given time, individuals can be observed and captured on video without their knowledge and/or permission. This can happen in public facilities such as train stations, stores, elevators, locker rooms, and even school hallways. This should raise some concerns about privacy. Therefore a fundamental challenge is designing surveillance systems used for security reasons that should protect the privacy of individuals. Most of the existing techniques focus on modifying the original scene either by adding noise and/or replacing objects using black boxes, blurring, or in-painting. Such techniques usually destroy the integrity of the original video, which may cause errors in the reidentification process when needed. For that reason, steganography techniques can be beneficial and convenient. In this chapter, we propose embedding the original video into the in-painted one. The proposed technique is carried out in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain of the cover video based on the H.264 video compression concept. Experimental results showed that the proposed method successfully introduced low distortion in the stego-video while maintaining an acceptable visual quality for the retrieved original frames.