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Main Authors: Huang, Guanchong, Fang, Song
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27179
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author Huang, Guanchong
Fang, Song
author_facet Huang, Guanchong
Fang, Song
contents Video identification attacks pose a significant privacy threat that can reveal videos that victims watch, which may disclose their hobbies, religious beliefs, political leanings, sexual orientation, and health status. Also, video watching history can be used for user profiling or advertising and may result in cyberbullying, discrimination, or blackmail. Existing extensive video inference techniques usually depend on analyzing network traffic generated by streaming online videos. In this work, we observe that the content of a subtitle determines its silhouette displayed on the screen, and identifying each subtitle silhouette also derives the temporal difference between two consecutive subtitles. We then propose SilhouetteTell, a novel video identification attack that combines the spatial and time domain information into a spatiotemporal feature of subtitle silhouettes. SilhouetteTell explores the spatiotemporal correlation between recorded subtitle silhouettes of a video and its subtitle file. It can infer both online and offline videos. Comprehensive experiments on off-the-shelf smartphones confirm the high efficacy of SilhouetteTell for inferring video titles and clips under various settings, including from a distance of up to 40 meters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_27179
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SilhouetteTell: Practical Video Identification Leveraging Blurred Recordings of Video Subtitles
Huang, Guanchong
Fang, Song
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Video identification attacks pose a significant privacy threat that can reveal videos that victims watch, which may disclose their hobbies, religious beliefs, political leanings, sexual orientation, and health status. Also, video watching history can be used for user profiling or advertising and may result in cyberbullying, discrimination, or blackmail. Existing extensive video inference techniques usually depend on analyzing network traffic generated by streaming online videos. In this work, we observe that the content of a subtitle determines its silhouette displayed on the screen, and identifying each subtitle silhouette also derives the temporal difference between two consecutive subtitles. We then propose SilhouetteTell, a novel video identification attack that combines the spatial and time domain information into a spatiotemporal feature of subtitle silhouettes. SilhouetteTell explores the spatiotemporal correlation between recorded subtitle silhouettes of a video and its subtitle file. It can infer both online and offline videos. Comprehensive experiments on off-the-shelf smartphones confirm the high efficacy of SilhouetteTell for inferring video titles and clips under various settings, including from a distance of up to 40 meters.
title SilhouetteTell: Practical Video Identification Leveraging Blurred Recordings of Video Subtitles
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27179