Video analytic techniques have been used to extract high level information from video streams. The technique leverages advances on machine learning to summarize complex image data into simple alert-signal to attract the attention of human operators. For example, in a station for the underground video analytic can help the operator to focus on an event from a specific camera rather than leaving this only to the human eye. A concern of such techniques is privacy as they expose people identity and enable profiling of personal habits and orientations. This work introduces ReSPEcT (Privacy Respecting theRmal basEd Specific Person rECogniTion), a privacy preserving video analytic system based on thermal video streams. ReSPEcT is able to identify a specific-human in thermal video streams from low-cost, low resolution cameras. The system leverages recent advances in machine learning (CNNs) and a plethora of pre-processing mechanisms, such as image automatic labeling, image segmentation, and image augmentation to reduce the stream background noise, improve resilience, strengthen human-body classification, and finally enable a specific human-target identification. ReSPEcT’s automatic labeling tool significantly reduces time thus automatically performing labeling using a model that can be retrained by an interactive web application. The experimental evaluation shows that overall ReSPEcT achieve 96.83% accuracy in identifying a specific person. Furthermore, is important to notice that while ReSPEcT can identify a specific human, the tool is not aware of the realidentity as it operates only on thermal images. ReSPEcT paves the way to use video analytic in a variety of privacyprotected scenarios, such as confidential meetings, sensitive spaces, or even public toilets.
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