Andreas Unterweger’s dissertation on privacy for surveillance was honoured as a significant future-oriented contribution to society by the Austrian Labour Chamber. Furthermore, Joris Lückenga, one of the Master students working at the center, has been awarded the AK prize.

Among other things, Andreas Unterweger’s research deals with methods for privacy for people depicted on surveillance camera footage. In particular, his research focuses on processing already compressed video data. This could so far only be perfomed with higher expense and/or less effective results by known methods. Andreas Unterweger proposed encryption methods that are suitable for all image and video formats commonly used in surveillance at present. With these methods, picture information can be restored in contrast to blackening or pixelating persons. This is for example useful for responsible authorities in crime detection to identify offenders without invading the privacy of uninvolved people.