Automating Visual Privacy Protection in the IoT Space

Abstract

The ubiquity of mobile camera devices has been triggering an outcry of privacy concerns, whereas privacy protection still relies on the cooperation of the photographer or camera hardware, which can hardly be guaranteed in practice. In this paper, we introduce LiShield, which automatically protects a physical scene against photographing, by illuminating it with smart LEDs flickering in specialized waveforms. Our prototype implementation and experiments show that LiShield can effectively destroy unauthorized capturing while maintaining robustness against potential attacks.