Personal Privacy Protection via Irrelevant Faces Tracking and Pixelation in Video Live Streaming

Abstract: To date, the privacy-protection intended pixelation tasks are still labor-intensive and yet to be studied. With the prevailing of video live streaming, establishing an online face pixelation mechanism during streaming is an urgency. In this paper, we develop a new method called Face Pixelation in Video Live Streaming (FPVLS) to generate automatic personal privacy filtering during unconstrained streaming activities. Simply applying multi-face trackers will encounter problems in target drifting, computing efficiency, and over-pixelation. Therefore, for fast and accurate pixelation of irrelevant people's faces, FPVLS is organized in a frame-to-video structure of two core stages. On individual frames, FPVLS utilizes image-based face detection and embedding networks to yield face vectors. In the raw trajectories generation stage, the proposed Positioned Incremental Affinity Propagation (PIAP) clustering algorithm leverages face vectors and positioned information to quickly associate the same person's faces across frames. Such frame-wise accumulated raw trajectories are likely to be intermittent and unreliable on video level. Hence, we further introduce the trajectory refinement stage that merges a proposal network with the two-sample test based on the Empirical Likelihood Ratio (ELR) statistic to refine the raw trajectories. A Gaussian filter is laid on the refined trajectories for final pixelation. On the video live streaming dataset we collected, FPVLS obtains satisfying accuracy, real-time efficiency, and contains the over-pixelation problems.