Asst. Prof. Serdar Çiftçi (Harran University) is going to give a seminar on Visual Privacy Protection Using False Colors, for Multimedia Informatics - Research Methods (MMI 700) course. You are all kindly invited. Sorry for multiple copies.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute
Time: January 3, 2018, 11:30-12:30

Visual Privacy Protection Using False Colors

Abstract:

Privacy protection in video surveillance is an important problem, and it will become even more important, as video surveillance is gains in popularity. However, simple methods for protecting privacy are not sufficient as they do not contain all the desired attributes that is expected from a good privacy protection algorithm. Privacy protected images must be reversible if the need arises to view them as unprotected (e.g., during a criminal investigation). Furthermore, protected image should not prohibit non-private statistics to be extracted. Also, the protected content should not be visually disturbing as it is the case with some of the existing privacy protection methods. Perhaps most importantly, the protection must be continuous: that is faces even in a single frame of a video should not remain unprotected. The algorithms that rely on computer vision techniques may therefore be vulnerable to this problem: if an algorithm fails to detect a sensitive region, it will remain unprotected.

In this seminar, methods that are commonly used for visual privacy protection will be reviewed and then a balanced method that was proposed in Ciftci's Ph.D. thesis will be mentioned. The proposed method is reversible, does not create disturbing outputs, do not prohibit collecting non-private information, does not rely on computer vision techniques.

Bio:

Serdar Ciftci is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Engineering at Harran University. He has obtained his B.Sc. degree from the Department of Computer Engineering at Selcuk University in 2007. He received both his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) respectively in 2001 and 2017. He has been in Multimedia Signal Processing Group Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as a visiting researcher between January-March 2016. His primary research interest is visual privacy protection. He is a reviewer for various international journals and conferences such as TUBITAK Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Selcuk University Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (SUJEST), and ACM Multimedia 2017.