Overview of the MediaEval 2014 Visual Privacy Task

This paper presents an overview of the Visual Privacy Task (VPT) of MediaEval 2014, its objectives, related dataset, and evaluation approaches. Participants in this task were required to implement a privacy filter or a combination of filters to protect various personal information regions in video sequences as provided. The challenge was to achieve an adequate balance between the degree of privacy protection, intelligibility (how much useful information is retained post privacy filtering), and pleasantness (how minimal were the adverse effects of filtering on the appearance of the video frames). The submissions from the eight (8) teams who participated in this task were evaluated subjectively by surveillance experts, practitioners, data protection experts and by naïve viewers using a crowdsourcing approach. 1