Privacy-Preserved In-Cabin Monitoring System for Autonomous Vehicles

Fully autonomous vehicles (FAVs) lack monitoring inside the cabin. Therefore, an in-cabin monitoring system (IMS) is required for surveilling people causing irregular or abnormal situations. However, monitoring in the public domain allows disclosure of an individual's face, which goes against privacy preservation. Furthermore, there is a contrary demand for privacy in the IMS of AVs. Therefore, an intelligent IMS must simultaneously satisfy the contrary requirements of personal privacy protection and person identification during abnormal situations. In this study, we proposed a privacy-preserved IMS, which can reidentify anonymized virtual individual faces in an abnormal situation. This IMS includes a step for extracting facial features, which is accomplished by the edge device (onboard unit) of the AV. This device anonymizes an individual's facial identity before transmitting the video frames to a data server. We created different abnormal scenarios in the vehicle cabin. Further, we reidentified the involved person by using the anonymized virtual face and the reserved feature vectors extracted from the suspected individual. Overall, the proposed approach preserves personal privacy while maintaining security in surveillance systems, such as for in-cabin monitoring of FAVs.