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Automating visual privacy protection using a smart LED

Published: 22 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The ubiquity of mobile camera devices has been triggering an outcry of privacy concerns, whereas existing privacy protection solutions still rely on the cooperation of the photographer or camera hardware, which can hardly be enforced in practice. In this paper, we introduce LiShield, which automatically protects a physical scene against photographing, by illuminating it with smart LEDs flickering in specialized waveforms. We use a model-driven approach to optimize the waveform design, so as to ensure protection against the (uncontrollable) cameras and potential image-processing-based attacks. We have also designed mechanisms to unblock authorized cameras and enable graceful degradation under strong ambient light interference. Our prototype implementation and experiments show that LiShield can effectively destroy unauthorized capturing while maintaining robustness against potential attacks.

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cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 63, Issue 2
February 2020
80 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/3380852
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 January 2020
Published in CACM Volume 63, Issue 2

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