Synthesizing high-fidelity frozen 3D scenes from monocular Mannequin-Challenge (MC) videos is a unique problem distinct from standard dynamic scene reconstruction. Instead of focusing on modeling motion, our goal is to create a frozen scene while strategically preserving subtle dynamics to enable user-controlled instant selection. To achieve this, we introduce a novel application of dynamic Gaussian splatting: the scene is modeled dynamically, which retains nearby temporal variation, and a static scene is rendered by fixing the model’s time parameter. However, under this usage, monocular capture with sparse temporal supervision introduces artifacts like ghosting and blur for Gaussians that become unobserved or occluded at weakly supervised timestamps. We propose Splannequin, an architecture-agnostic regularization that detects two states of Gaussian primitives, hidden and defective, and applies temporal anchoring. Under predominantly forward camera motion, hidden states are anchored to their well-observed past states, while defective states are anchored to future states with stronger supervision. Our method integrates into existing dynamic Gaussian pipelines via simple loss terms, requires no architectural changes, and adds zero inference overhead. This results in markedly improved visual quality, enabling high-fidelity, user-selectable frozen-time renderings, validated by a 96% user preference. Project page: https://chien90190.github.io/splannequin/

Recent years have witnessed a surge in hybrid IoT-cloud applications where an end user distributes the desired computation between the IoT and cloud nodes. While achieving significant speed up, the major caveat of this approach is data privacy. Privacy-preserving methods have received major attention in the past few years, mainly because they can potentially solve this issue. Among several proposals, methods based on dynamic encoding and perturbation offer flexibility and low overhead. However, they often consider a weak adversary model or overlook practical limitations, such as encoding latency and complexity. This work proposes a new privacy-preserving method to address these issues. The key contributions of this article are twofold. First, unlike state-of-the-art, it proposes a new approach based on evolutionary algorithms to systematically evaluate the robustness of the encoding algorithm against a large population of potential adversaries. Second, it develops a dynamic obfuscation strategy that balances latency requirements in a realistic IoT-cloud hybrid ecosystem and privacy demands. Additionally, our method offers a unique benefit: it can be used alone for privacy protection, or it can be integrated with most existing methods to enhance privacy and reduce latency. The applicability and effectiveness of our proposed methods are thoroughly evaluated using two popular deep neural networks in a real-world IoT-cloud setting. We study the impact of our approach on important metrics, such as accuracy and privacy. Our results show that our proposed method can improve the overall privacy of a given IoT-cloud hybrid ecosystem by more than 10% on average.

Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) techniques have allowed remote and private inference for resource-constrained internet-of-things (IoT) devices on the cloud. The main challenge in most of the existing PPML technologies is a severe slowdown in inference latency mainly due to the use of encryption during the computation. To combat this, an emerging method is to leverage encoding as an alternative. While this results in a significant speedup, it imposes the burden of encoding to the resource-constrained IoT/edge device. Despite being feasible for simple workloads where encoding is lightweight, devices with very limited computational capabilities face a tradeoff between latency and privacy when performing complex tasks.