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1. Real-Time Video Anonymization in Smart City Intersections

   A. Angus, Z. Duan ( January 2022 , in Proc. IEEE MASS’22 (invited), 2022 (invited))

   Video cameras in smart cities can be used to provide data to improve pedestrian safety and traffic management. Video recordings inherently violate privacy, and technological solutions need to be found to preserve it. Smart city applications deployed on top of the COSMOS research testbed in New York City are envisioned to be privacy friendly. This contribution presents one approach to privacy preservation– a video anonymization pipeline implemented in the form of blurring of pedestrian faces and vehicle license plates. The pipeline utilizes customized deeplearning models based on YOLOv4 for detection of privacysensitive objects in street-level video recordings. To achieve real time inference, the pipeline includes speed improvements via NVIDIA TensorRT optimization. When applied to the video dataset acquired at an intersection within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, the proposed method anonymizes visible faces and license plates with recall of up to 99% and inference speed faster than 100 frames per second. The results of a comprehensive evaluation study are presented. A selection of anonymized videos can be accessed via the COSMOS testbed portal. Index Terms—Smart City, Sensors, Video Surveillance, Privacy Protection, Object Detection, Deep Learning, TensorRT. 

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2. Real-Time Video Anonymization in Smart City Intersections

   A. Angus, Z. Duan ( January 2022 , in Proc. IEEE MASS’22 (invited), Oct. 2022)

   Video cameras in smart cities can be used to provide data to improve pedestrian safety and traffic management. Video recordings inherently violate privacy, and technological solutions need to be found to preserve it. Smart city applications deployed on top of the COSMOS research testbed in New York City are envisioned to be privacy friendly. This contribution presents one approach to privacy preservation – a video anonymization pipeline implemented in the form of blurring of pedestrian faces and vehicle license plates. The pipeline utilizes customized deeplearning models based on YOLOv4 for detection of privacysensitive objects in street-level video recordings. To achieve real time inference, the pipeline includes speed improvements via NVIDIA TensorRT optimization. When applied to the video dataset acquired at an intersection within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, the proposed method anonymizes visible faces and license plates with recall of up to 99% and inference speed faster than 100 frames per second. The results of a comprehensive evaluation study are presented. A selection of anonymized videos can be accessed via the COSMOS testbed portal. 

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3. Real-timeMulti-CameraAnalytics forTrafficInformationExtractionandVisualization

   MahshidGhasemi†, SofiaKleisarchaki‡ ( January 2023 , IEEE PerCom'23)

   The density and complexity of urban environments present significant challenges for autonomous vehicles. Moreover, ensuring pedestrians’ safety and protecting personal privacy are crucial considerations in these environments. Smart city intersections and AI-powered traffic management systems will be essential for addressing these challenges. Therefore, our research focuses on creating an experimental framework for the design of applications that support the secure and efficient management of traffic intersections in urban areas. We integrated two cameras (street-level and bird’s eye view), both viewing an intersection, and a programmable edge computing node, deployed within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, with a central management platform provided by Kentyou. We designed a pipeline to collect and analyze the video streams from both cameras and obtain real-time traffic/pedestrian-related information to support smart city applications. The obtained information from both cameras is merged, and the results are sent to a dedicated dashboard for real-time visualization and further assessment (e.g., accident prevention). The process does not require sending the raw videos in order to avoid violating pedestrians’ privacy. In this demo, we present the designed video analytic pipelines and their integration with Kentyou central management platform. Index Terms—object detection and tracking, camera networks, smart intersection, real-time visualization 

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4. Real-time camera analytics for enhancing traffic intersection safety

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3498361.3538669  

   Ghasemi, Mahshid ; Kleisarchaki, Sofia ; Calmant, Thomas ; Gürgen, Levent ; Ghaderi, Javad ; Kostic, Zoran ; Zussman, Gil ( June 2022 , in Proc. ACM MobiSys’22, 2022)

   Crowded metropolises present unique challenges to the potential deployment of autonomous vehicles. Safety of pedestrians cannot be compromised and personal privacy must be preserved. Smart city intersections will be at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered citizen-friendly traffic management systems for such metropolises. Hence, the main objective of this work is to develop an experimentation framework for designing applications in support of secure and efficient traffic intersections in urban areas. We integrated a camera and a programmable edge computing node, deployed within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, with an Eclipse sensiNact data platform provided by Kentyou. We use this pipeline to collect and analyze video streams in real-time to support smart city applications. In this demo, we present a video analytics pipeline that analyzes the video stream from a COSMOS’ street-level camera to extract traffic/crowd-related information and sends it to a dedicated dashboard for real-time visualization and further assessment. This is done without sending the raw video, in order to avoid violating pedestrians’ privacy. 

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5. Demo: Real-time Multi-Camera Analytics for Traffic Information Extraction and Visualization

   M. Ghasemi, S. Kleisarchaki ( January 2023 , in Proc. IEEE PerCom’23, Mar. 2023)

   The density and complexity of urban environments present significant challenges for autonomous vehicles. Moreover, ensuring pedestrians’ safety and protecting personal privacy are crucial considerations in these environments. Smart city intersections and AI-powered traffic management systems will be essential for addressing these challenges. Therefore, our research focuses on creating an experimental framework for the design of applications that support the secure and efficient management of traffic intersections in urban areas. We integrated two cameras (street-level and bird’s eye view), both viewing an intersection, and a programmable edge computing node, deployed within the COSMOS testbed in New York City, with a central management platform provided by Kentyou. We designed a pipeline to collect and analyze the video streams from both cameras and obtain real-time traffic/pedestrian-related information to support smart city applications. The obtained information from both cameras is merged, and the results are sent to a dedicated dashboard for real-time visualization and further assessment (e.g., accident prevention). The process does not require sending the raw videos in order to avoid violating pedestrians’ privacy. In this demo, we present the designed video analytic pipelines and their integration with Kentyou central management platform. 

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