X-Stream: A Flexible, Adaptive Video Transformer for Privacy-Preserving Video Stream Analytics

Video stream analytics (VSA) systems fuel many exciting applications that facilitate people’s lives, but also raise critical concerns about exposing too much individuals’ privacy. To alleviate these concerns, various frameworks have been presented to enhance the privacy of VSA systems. Yet, existing solutions suffer two limitations: (1) being scenario-customized, thus limiting the generality of adapting to multifarious scenarios, (2) requiring complex, imperative programming, and tedious process, thus largely reducing the usability of such systems. In this paper, we present X-Stream, a privacy-preserving video transformer that achieves flexibility and efficiency for a large variety of VSA tasks. X-Stream features three major novel designs: (1) a declarative query interface that provides a simple yet expressive interface for users to describe both their privacy protection and content exposure requirements, (2) an adaptation mechanism that dynamically selects the most suitable privacy-preserving techniques and their parameters based on the current video context, and (3) an efficient execution engine that incorporates optimizations for multi-task deduplication and inter-frame inference. We implement X-Stream and evaluate it with representative VSA tasks and public video datasets. The results show that X-Stream achieves significantly improved privacy protection quality and performance over the state-of-the-art, while being simple to use.