Privacy-by-design AIoT vision for intelligent urban environments

Ivanovska Preskar, Marija (author), Kreft, Jakob (author), Štruc, Vitomir (author), Perš, Janez (author)

The recent advancements in AI (Artificial Intelligence) have been instrumental in fostering the development of AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things)-enabled urban environments. Machine vision and image analysis, in particular, have become integral to a wide array of AI applications within the field of urban planning and monitoring. Yet, the rapid adoption of AI algorithms in public areas has significantly heightened privacy concerns. In this paper, we introduce a privacy-by-design approach tailored for intelligent urban systems, presenting a holistic approach to the development and deployment of AI-driven systems for privacy-preserving image acquisition and analysis. Specifically, we design an embedded vision system that acquires privacy-protected data, safeguarding sensitive information against unauthorized access and potential misuse. Furthermore, we propose a strategy for developing AI vision methods using data that has been anonymized, ensuring that privacy is maintained throughout the AI application building process. Through experiments on a real-world AIoT-enabled urban environment use case – traffic flow monitoring at a city intersection – we demonstrate that our approach upholds strong privacy guarantees while maintaining the operational performance of modern AI vision systems.

• Language: English
• Keywords: privacy-by-design, AIoT, embedded vision systems, visual data anonymization, intelligent urban systems, privacy-preserving computer vision, edge AI
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FE - Faculty of Electrical Engineering
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2025
• Number of pages: 15 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 169, art. 103586
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-174752
• UDC: 004.93
• ISSN on article: 1383-7621
• DOI: 10.1016/j.sysarc.2025.103586
• COBISS.SI-ID: 252456963
• Publication date in RUL: 09.10.2025

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Journal of systems architecture
• Shortened title: J. systems archit.
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 1383-7621
• COBISS.SI-ID: 2687254

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: vgrajena zasebnost, AIoT, vgrajeni sistemi strojnega vida, anonimizacija vizualnih podatkov, inteligentni sistemi za pametna mesta, računalniški vid z ohranitvijo zasebnosti, umetna inteligenca na robu