Privacy-Aware Camera 2.0 Technical Report

With the increasing deployment of intelligent sensing technologies in highly sensitive environments such as restrooms and locker rooms, visual surveillance systems face a profound privacy-security paradox. Existing privacy-preserving approaches, including physical desensitization, encryption, and obfuscation, often compromise semantic understanding or fail to ensure mathematically provable irreversibility. Although Privacy Camera 1.0 eliminated visual data at the source to prevent leakage, it provided only textual judgments, leading to evidentiary blind spots in disputes. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel privacy-preserving perception framework based on the AI Flow paradigm and a collaborative edge-cloud architecture. By deploying a visual desensitizer at the edge, raw images are transformed in real time into abstract feature vectors through nonlinear mapping and stochastic noise injection under the Information Bottleneck principle, ensuring identity-sensitive information is stripped and original images are mathematically unreconstructable. The abstract representations are transmitted to the cloud for behavior recognition and semantic reconstruction via a "dynamic contour" visual language, achieving a critical balance between perception and privacy while enabling illustrative visual reference without exposing raw images.

A Real-Time Privacy-Preserving Behavior Recognition System via Edge-Cloud Collaboration

As intelligent sensing expands into high-privacy environments such as restrooms and changing rooms, the field faces a critical privacy-security paradox. Traditional RGB surveillance raises significant concerns regarding visual recording and storage, while existing privacy-preserving methods-ranging from physical desensitization to traditional cryptographic or obfuscation techniques-often compromise semantic understanding capabilities or fail to guarantee mathematical irreversibility against reconstruction attacks. To address these challenges, this study presents a novel privacy-preserving perception technology based on the AI Flow theoretical framework and an edge-cloud collaborative architecture. The proposed methodology integrates source desensitization with irreversible feature mapping. Leveraging Information Bottleneck theory, the edge device performs millisecond-level processing to transform raw imagery into abstract feature vectors via non-linear mapping and stochastic noise injection. This process constructs a unidirectional information flow that strips identity-sensitive attributes, rendering the reconstruction of original images impossible. Subsequently, the cloud platform utilizes multimodal family models to perform joint inference solely on these abstract vectors to detect abnormal behaviors. This approach fundamentally severs the path to privacy leakage at the architectural level, achieving a breakthrough from video surveillance to de-identified behavior perception and offering a robust solution for risk management in high-sensitivity public spaces.