CCTV-FullyAware: toward end-to-end feasible privacy-enhancing and CCTV forensics applications

Abstract

It is estimated that over 1 billion Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras are operational worldwide. The advertised main benefits of CCTV cameras have always been the same; physical security, safety, and crime deterrence. The current scale and rate of deployment of CCTV cameras bring additional research and technical challenges for CCTV forensics as well, as for privacy enhancements.This paper presents the first end-to-end system for CCTV forensics and feasible privacy-enhancing applications such as exposure measurement, CCTV route recovery, CCTV-aware routing/navigation, and crowd-sourcing. For this, we developed and evaluated four complex and distinct modules (CCTVCV), all of which are novel, unique, peer-reviewed, and can be used either separately or within an integrated end-to-end system such as CCTV-FullyAware. We release all our artefacts as open-source/open data. We hope our work will bootstrap policy-driving discussions and large-scale applications such as CCTV forensics and privacyenhancing technologies.