User-centric protection and privacy in smart surveillance systems

During the last decades surveillance systems developed from analog one camera one monitor systems to highly complex distributed systems with heterogeneous sensors that can handle surveillance tasks autonomously. With raising power and complexity, ensuring privacy became a key challenge. An event-driven SOA architecture that follows the privacy by design principle is a promising approach to realize a smart surveillance system and is described in this work. Enforcement of privacy is not only complex for engineers and system designers; rather it is not understandable for the average user, who cannot even assess potentials and limitations of smart surveillance systems. This work presents an approach for privacy that is focused on the user, i.e., the observed subject. By using a mobile device the user can interact with the surveillance system and is not passive anymore, as in conventional surveillance deployments. This restores the balance between the observed and the observers, enhances transparency and will raise the acceptance of surveillance technology. In the highlighted approach the user can control his individual-related data and privacy preferences and can use services that are beneficial for him.