Researchers develop privacy-preserving cameras for smart home devices

From robotic vacuum cleaners to baby monitors, the smart devices which are becoming increasingly present in homes and workplaces use images and videos to navigate and monitor their surroundings.  

These devices form part of the internet-of-things (IoT), smart systems that connect to the internet to operate. As such, they can be at risk of being hacked or lost through human error, making the images and data they collect vulnerable to theft by third parties, sometimes with malicious intent.

To counter this, researchers from the Australian Centre for Robotics at the University of Sydney and the QUT Centre for Robotics (QCR) at Queensland University of Technology have created a new approach to designing cameras that process and scramble visual information before it is digitised so that it becomes obscured to the point of anonymity. 

Researchers said the distorted images can still be used by robots to complete their tasks but do not provide a comprehensive visual representation that compromises privacy.