Edge-Cooperative Privacy-Preserving Object Detection Over Random Point Cloud Shares for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) employ the point cloud data captured by LiDAR to enhance the capability of object recognition and detection. Edge computing with its inherent advantages can help CAVs alleviate resource constraints and enable faster situational awareness and data processing. However, the point cloud data contains private information, such as vehicle identity, location and trajectory, directly uploading the raw point cloud to the edge nodes or other vehicle will lead to serious privacy leakage. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to try to tackle this challenge and propose a privacy-preserving object detection framework over random point cloud shares for CAVs (referred to SecPCV), aiming to guarantee the privacy of both point cloud and object detection results. In SecPCV, CAVs split point cloud into two random shares based on additive secret sharing (ASS) and upload them to two competing edge nodes, respectively, which greatly compress the computational load of CAVs. Without changing the object detection network in plaintext environment, the edge nodes can cooperatively and securely extract, regress, and classify over point cloud shares. Theoretical analysis ensure the efficiency and security of the SecPCV framework. Experimental results with the real KITTI point cloud dataset indicate that SecPCV can achieve the consistent object detection accuracy as that in plaintext environment, and provide a feasible solution for CAVs secure sharing of point cloud data.