Video Manipulation Techniques for the Protection of Privacy in Remote Presence Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates video manipulation techniques to enhance privacy in remote presence systems, demonstrating their effectiveness in reducing privacy violations while maintaining task performance through two user studies.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates specific video manipulation methods for privacy protection in remote robot systems, validated by user studies.

Findings

Video manipulations reduce privacy violations across different privacy types.

Privacy techniques do not impair remote user task performance.

Manipulation methods are effective in real-world office environment scenarios.

Abstract

Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user sees. Through two user studies, we explore the effectiveness of different video manipulation techniques at providing different types of privacy. We simultaneously examine task performance in the presence of privacy protection. In the first study, participants were asked to watch a video captured by a robot exploring an office environment and to complete a series of observational tasks under differing video manipulation conditions. Our results show that using manipulations of the video stream can lead to fewer privacy violations for different privacy types. Through a second user study, it was demonstrated that these privacy-protecting techniques were effective without diminishing the task performance of the remote user.