PPEDCRF: Dynamic-CRF-Guided Selective Perturbation for Background-Based Location Privacy in Video Sequences

We propose PPEDCRF, a calibrated selective perturbation framework that protects background-based location privacy in released video frames against gallery-based retrieval attackers. Even after GPS metadata are stripped, an adversary can geolocate a frame by matching its background visual cues to geo-tagged reference imagery; PPEDCRF mitigates this threat by estimating location-sensitive background regions with a dynamic conditional random field (DCRF), rescaling perturbation strength with a normalized control penalty (NCP), and injecting Gaussian noise only inside the inferred regions via a DP-style calibration rule. On a controlled paired-scene retrieval benchmark with eight attacker backbones and three noise seeds, PPEDCRF reduces ResNet18 Top-1 retrieval accuracy from 0.667 to 0.361±0.127 at σ0=8 while preserving 36.14,dB PSNR -- an ≈6,dB quality advantage over global Gaussian noise. Transfer across the eight-backbone seed-averaged benchmark is broadly supportive (23 of 24 backbone-gallery cells show negative Delta), while appendix-scale confirmation identifies MixVPR as a remaining adverse-transfer exception. Matched-operating-point analysis shows that PPEDCRF and global Gaussian noise converge in Top-1 privacy at equal utility, so the practical benefit is spatially concentrated perturbation that preserves higher visual quality at any given noise scale rather than stronger matched-utility privacy. Code: https://github.com/mabo1215/PPEDCRF