Anonymization and De-identification of Surveillance Visual Information: A Review

The recent widespread adoption of video surveillance systems implies an invasive proactive approach to ensure citizen’s security. The ever-increasing amount of recorded information, implies a direct threat to citizen’s privacy and their right to preserve their personal information. Thus, a general social concern has raised for the citizen’s lost of privacy, demanding new approaches to preserve and protect their privacy, ensuring their anonymity and freedom of action whilst maintaining the surveillance performance. Several approaches have been proposed to preserve sensitive information. In this paper, a review of the existing anonymization and de-identification techniques is presented, categorising them by the domain in which the anonymization is applied and evaluating them with a common framework which takes into account the features and characteristics of each method.