Imcube @ MediaEval 2015 DroneProtect Task: Reversible Masking using Steganography.

This paper describes Imcube’s participation in the DroneProtect Task of MediaEval 2015, which aims to obscure privacy-concerned image regions in videos sequences captured with drones. As a result persons and vehicles should be unrecognisable, but the semantic meaning of the scene should remain understandable to viewer. We use an approach which replaces the privacy-concerned region with an automatically computed composite of inpainted background and foreground contour. Before obfuscation, the image region to be hidden is extracted and steganographically embedded into the processed frame leading to a reversible solution. The evaluation shows that the developed solution achieves good privacy protection while preserving the intelligibility and aesthetic pleasantness of the original video.