Enhancing lifelogging privacy by detecting screens

Abstract

Low-cost, lightweight wearable cameras let us record (or 'lifelog') our lives from a 'first-person' perspective for purposes ranging from fun to therapy. But they also capture private information that people may not want to be recorded, especially if images are stored in the cloud or visible to other people. For example, recent studies suggest that computer screens may be lifeloggers' single greatest privacy concern, because many people spend a considerable amount of time in front of devices that display private information. In this paper, we investigate using computer vision to automatically detect computer screens in photo lifelogs. We evaluate our approach on an existing in-situ dataset of 36 people who wore cameras for a week, and show that our technique could help manage privacy in the upcoming era of wearable cameras.