EgoVeil: Personalized Privacy Reasoning for Egocentric Video

Xue Wang, Yang Zhang

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) enable AI systems to interpret egocentric video. Yet continuous visual capture raises privacy concerns because sensitive content is pervasive and varies across users and contexts. We present EgoVeil, a personalized privacy reasoning system that determines which visual content to obscure based on individual preferences while retaining context useful for downstream assistance. It converts localized visual regions into structured semantic observations and combines a privacy reasoner with an explicit user-specific memory for personalized privacy reasoning. This design supports personalization and continual adaptation as preference evidence accumulates. We evaluate on in-the-wild data from 10 smart-glasses users under a cross-user chronological protocol. EgoVeil achieves 91.93% balanced accuracy and 84.42% Mask recall, outperforming direct VLM baselines and other controlled privacy reasoning baselines. Our results show that personalized, adaptive privacy reasoning better aligns privacy preservation with individual preferences while retaining the visual context needed for effective smart-glasses assistance.