An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation Mechanism with Preserving Privacy

Visual-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (e.g. equipped with an optical camera) have become more popular in daily life, because of their flexibility and convenience in capturing images/videos. Existing works mainly focus on the image/video capturing efficiency, but overlook the privacy violations that may be caused by the misuse of UAVs. In this paper, we study the Privacy Preserving Navigation (PPN) problem of the path planning of a UAV in 3D space to cover a 2D Target Area (TA), so that TA is covered while the privacy of sub-areas within TA is violated. We prove the PPN is NP-hard and propose a heuristic solution to PPN. The real word data trace driven emulation results show our solution is effective.