Secure and Intelligent Visual Data Storage for Analytics

About US

SISSVid is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) project at University of Galway, Ireland. This multidisciplinary industry-led project is carried out in collaboration with the School of Law and Komply Privacy Ltd, combining expertise in computer science, privacy regulation, and legal compliance.

Any society that will give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

– Benjamin Franklin

Vision

Securing Visual Data in the Digital Age

SISSVid envisions a future where large-scale visual data is processed responsibly. It aims to protect privacy, support data-driven insights, and enable secure, compliant access for post-event analysis.

  • Technological Innovation
  • Compliance by Design
  • Privacy by-design
  • Performance efficiency
  • Sustainable and Resilient Cities
  • Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Background

Intelligent Visual Systems (IVS), particularly Smart video surveillance systems (VSS), collect sensitive personal data, such as appearance, actions, location, gestures, and clothing. This raises serious concerns about individual privacy rights and the ethical and legal implications of collecting, storing, and processing such information. Privacy is a fundamental human right rooted in dignity, autonomy, and individual respect.

To safeguard these rights, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR) enforces lawful, fair, and transparent handling of personal data across all sectors. However, most existing surveillance technologies lack built-in mechanisms for privacy-preserving video storage and secure data analytics. This gap limits the ethical deployment of automated video systems, particularly in public and semi-public environments.

Addressing the Gap

SISSVid identifies the legal and ethical challenges involved in storing video data captured in public and semi-public spaces, especially when recorded on edge devices. The project responds to this gap by proposing a GDPR-compliant solution that ensures secure storage and compliant retrieval of visual data.

Project Objectives

SISSVid aims to develop a secure and cost-effective storage and retrieval system that ensures lawful, transparent, and purpose-specific processing of surveillance data in compliance with EU data protection regulations.

Enable GDPR-Compliant Video Management: Develop a system that enforces lawful processing for video surveillance data.

Secure Storage of Surveillance Videos: Optimized encryption techniques to protect stored visual data to ensure confidentiality.

Privacy-preserving Content Retrieval: Develop a DL-based, efficient, and accurate object/event-level retrieval system that helps investigators retrieve video clips using descriptive queries.

Align with Sustainable Development Goals: Contribute to UN Sustainable Development Goals 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), and 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions) by promoting secure and intelligent infrastructure for visual data management.

How We Achieve It

Data Minimisation

Implements motion-based summarisation, capturing and storing only essential visual data, reducing storage needs and limiting irrelevant or non-critical content exposure.

Data Protection

Implements irreversible, lightweight, selective encryption to conceal objects (persons and Vehicles), utilising panoptic segmentation for secure storage and privacy-protected retrieval.

Privacy Protected Retrieval

Developed content-based retrieval that supports contextual search through natural language queries, which allows insights and event searches to be performed directly on encrypted data.