PrivHAR-Bench: A Graduated Privacy Benchmark Dataset for Video-Based Action Recognition

TL;DR

PrivHAR-Bench is a comprehensive benchmark dataset for evaluating the privacy-utility trade-off in video-based human activity recognition, featuring graduated privacy transformations and standardized evaluation tools.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-tier privacy benchmark dataset with diverse privacy levels, standardized evaluation protocols, and publicly available resources for fair comparison of privacy-preserving HAR methods.

Findings

Recognition accuracy decreases with increased privacy strength.

Cross-domain accuracy drops significantly under encryption and background removal.

The dataset enables controlled, interpretable evaluation of privacy-preserving methods.

Abstract

Existing research on privacy-preserving Human Activity Recognition (HAR) typically evaluates methods against a binary paradigm: clear video versus a single privacy transformation. This limits cross-method comparability and obscures the nuanced relationship between privacy strength and recognition utility. We introduce \textit{PrivHAR-Bench}, a multi-tier benchmark dataset designed to standardize the evaluation of the \textit{Privacy-Utility Trade-off} in video-based action recognition. PrivHAR-Bench applies a graduated spectrum of visual privacy transformations: from lightweight spatial obfuscation to cryptographic block permutation, to a curated subset of 15 activity classes selected for human articulation diversity. Each of the 1,932 source videos is distributed across 9 parallel tiers of increasing privacy strength, with additional background-removed variants to isolate the contribution of human motion features from contextual scene bias. We provide lossless frame sequences, per-frame bounding boxes, estimated pose keypoints with joint-level confidence scores, standardized group-based train/test splits, and an evaluation toolkit computing recognition accuracy and privacy metrics. Empirical validation using R3D-18 demonstrates a measurable and interpretable degradation curve across tiers, with within-tier accuracy declining from 88.8\% (clear) to 53.5\% (encrypted, background-removed) and cross-domain accuracy collapsing to 4.8\%, establishing PrivHAR-Bench as a controlled benchmark for comparing privacy-preserving HAR methods under standardized conditions. The dataset, generation pipeline, and evaluation code are publicly available.