A multi-level privacy-preserving scheme for extracting traffic images

Traffic images are constantly used as a stick to assess traffic conditions. Traffic flow statistical analysis, road condition safety monitoring, vehicle violation detection, accident surveillance, and the driving environment perception of autonomous vehicles are all functionalities that depend on the processing of traffic images. However, traffic images contain privacy-sensitive information related to users, such as license plate numbers, drivers and passengers. Extracting, analyzing and sharing such privacy-sensitive information without any security measures may raise concerns among users about potential privacy violations. This paper proposes a multi-level privacy protection scheme for traffic image extraction based on compressive sensing, which has the advantages of data undersampling, privacy protection and data access control. Detailed compression rate analysis demonstrates that the proposed solution can effectively reduce the transmission load of image information. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves multi-level reconstruction qualities and high-security strength for users with different authorities. Thus, it has a good application prospect in an image-based intelligent traffic management system.