PrivacyCamera: Cooperative Privacy-Aware Photographing with Mobile Phones
Ang Leo Li, Qinghua Li, Wei Gao · 2016
Nowadays, mobile phones are usually embedded with powerful cameras. Due to the convenience of carrying mobile phones, an increasing number of people use mobile phones to take photos anytime and anywhere. However, when a user takes a photo of a scenery, a building or a target person, sometimes an unexpected stranger is also included in the photo. Such photos reveal where the stranger has been and thus can breach his privacy. This problem has received little attention in the literature. In this paper, we propose PrivacyCamera, a cooperative system to protect the stranger's privacy in the above scenario. Through cooperation between the photographer and the stranger, the system can automatically blur the stranger's face in the photo upon the stranger's request when the photo is being taken. This paper describes the design, analysis, prototype implementation, and experimental evaluation of the system. Experiments show that PrivacyCamera can effectively protect stranger's privacy in an efficient way.