Abstract
Smart building control, managing queues for instant points of service, security systems, and customer support can benefit from the number of occupants information known as occupancy. Due to interrupted real-time continuous monitoring capabilities of state-of-the-art cameras, a vision-based system can be easily deployed for occupancy monitoring. However, processing of images or videos over insecure channels can raise several privacy concerns due to constant recording of an image or video footage. In this context, occupancy monitoring along with privacy protection is a challenging task. This paper presents a novel chaos-based lightweight privacy preserved occupancy monitoring scheme. Persons' movements were detected using a Gaussian mixture model and Kalman filtering. A specific region of interest, i.e., persons' faces and bodies, was encrypted using multi-chaos mapping. For pixel encryption, Intertwining and Chebyshev maps were employed in confusion and diffusion processes, respectively. The number of people was counted and the occupancy information was sent to the ThingSpeak cloud platform. The proposed chaos-based lightweight occupancy monitoring system is tested against numerous security metrics such as correlation, entropy, Number of Pixel Changing Rate (NPCR), Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC), Structural Content (SC), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak to Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Time Complexity (TC). All security metrics confirm the strength of the proposed scheme.