Blurring Face

Introduction

The intensive use of surveillance cameras and video devices in many spheres of human life has raised serious privacy concerns. Concealing or anonymizing the identity of the people who accidentally ended up in your shot can help in preserving their digital privacy and assuring their anonymity.

Face blurring is the fastest and easiest strategy to keep people’s privacy in photos while still allowing users to share photos over online social networks. There are plenty of mobile applications that enable us to blur a face or any part of an image just after you’ve taken a shot. Some of these include the following:

• Auto Blind Auto Blur
• Blur Face - Censor, Pixelate & Blur Photo
• Skitch

Various online services also include the following:

• blur-face
• Facepixelizer

Common use cases for face blurring

This technology is mainly employed to comply with privacy laws and anonymity rights by concealing the identity of people who don’t want to be recognized or identified in media or online.

This technology may come in handy in the following situations:

• Protecting minors online: When parents don’t want to show their children’s faces online.

• Safeguarding people’s privacy on social media: Sometimes, people don’t want to be seen in a certain location. This utility may serve to blur all the other faces at once.

• Redacting faces on product photos in online marketplaces: For instance, redacting can be a good idea when you want to sell your car without showing your face in the ad.

Objective

This lesson aims to leverage the capabilities of AI and deep learning in order to detect faces in photos and then run a process to redact them automatically.