Robust Privacy-Preserving Motion Detection and Object Tracking in Encrypted Streaming Video

Video privacy leakage is becoming an increasingly severe public problem, especially in cloud-based video surveillance systems. It leads to the new need for secure cloud-based video applications, where the video is encrypted for privacy protection. Despite some methods that have been proposed for encrypted video moving object detection and tracking, none has robust performance against complex and dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust privacy-preserving motion detection and multiple object tracking scheme for encrypted surveillance video bitstreams. By analyzing the properties of the video codec and format-compliant encryption schemes, we propose a new compressed-domain feature to capture motion information in complex surveillance scenarios. Based on this feature, we design an adaptive clustering algorithm for moving object segmentation with an accuracy of 4x4 pixels. We then propose a multiple object tracking scheme that uses Kalman filter estimation and adaptive measurement refinement. The proposed scheme does not require video decryption or full decompression and has a very low computation load. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme achieves the best detection and tracking performance compared with existing works in the encrypted and compressed domain. Our scheme can be effectively used in complex surveillance scenarios with different challenges, such as camera movement/jitter, dynamic background, and shadows.