Event Encryption for Neuromorphic Vision Sensors: Framework, Algorithm, and Evaluation

Nowadays, our lives have benefited from various vision-based applications, such as video surveillance, human identification and aided driving. Unauthorized access to the vision-related data greatly threatens users’ privacy, and many encryption schemes have been proposed to secure images and videos in those conventional scenarios. Neuromorphic vision sensor (NVS) is a brand new kind of bio-inspired sensor that can generate a stream of impulse-like events rather than synchronized image frames, which reduces the sensor’s latency and broadens the applications in surveillance and identification. However, the privacy issue related to NVS remains a significant challenge. For example, some image reconstruction and human identification approaches may expose privacy-related information from NVS events. This work is the first to investigate the privacy of NVS. We firstly analyze the possible security attacks to NVS, including grayscale image reconstruction and privacy-related classification. We then propose a dedicated encryption framework for NVS, which incorporates a 2D chaotic mapping to scramble the positions of events and flip their polarities. In addition, an updating score has been designed for controlling the frequency of execution, which supports efficient encryption on different platforms. Finally, extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed encryption framework can effectively protect NVS events against grayscale image reconstruction and human identification, and meanwhile, achieve high efficiency on various platforms including resource-constrained devices.