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Google Begins Blurring Faces In Street View
mytrip notes a News.com article reporting that Google has begun blurring faces in its Street View service, which has spawned privacy concerns since its introduction last year. Google has been working for a couple of years to advance the state of the art of face recognition. Quoting News.com: 'The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference...' Google wrote about the program in their Lat/Long blog."
This is the nice thing about living in a town no one cares about/knows about.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
It's been awhile since a Google post on Slashdot has focused on the company improving our privacy. Good work!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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I guess these girls are happy to be blurred.
It would be cool if there were an option on sites like Facebook or Flickr to blur the faces on my photos for anyone but my friends.
With technology like this, I wonder how far away Google Image Search is from being able to search image content?
steampunk web design
For a second there, I was worried that all those poor people had seen the ring.
Sort-of off topic, but also sort-of on topic...
If you have an out of focus picture, can you manipulate the image mathematically to put it "in focus" or is there some information lost in the out-of-focusness so you can't do this.
And if so, with the appropriate app, will you be able to un-blur the people's faces in Google Street View?
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Because, you know, the LAST thing I want to happen when I'm out on a public street is to be seen by anyone.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
What do they do when they see swirly-faced guy walking down the street?
If you have an out of focus picture, can you manipulate the image mathematically to put it "in focus" or is there some information lost in the out-of-focusness so you can't do this.
A:Yes
And if so, with the appropriate app, will you be able to un-blur the people's faces in Google Street View?
A:Yes
.. blurryfaceporn.com
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Print a giant face over your storefront/building just to see what happens.
Damn...there goes my 15 minutes of fame.
You cannot get back the information that has been lost, IF it has been lost. "Swirling" doesn't remove much information, but significant blurring does. What you would need is the computer that is used in Bladerunner and many other TV/movie scenes that will recreate the data for you, giving infinite zoom ability. These computers also can remove *all* noise from audio and recreate all the underlying sounds.
My understanding is that people in public should have no expectations of privacy. Or is that just a U.S. thing? Furthermore, as their algorithms get better, will Google skip blurring the faces of famous people? They certainly have no expectations of privacy in public.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm starting work on a full body face suit. I think I'll also line it with tinfoil - can't hurt.
You can't add pixels that aren't there, and an out of focus picture is effectively a lower resolution.
You can, however, apply statistical analysis and AI learning techniques to guess the likely locations of pixels. In that way, you can sharpen a photo somewhat, though it may be inexact. My understanding is that contextual analysis is the next step- if you have pictures of a person and a blurry person, and have more pictures of that person and less-blurry people, you can make predictions about who the fuzzy people are.
Of course, I wear a beard so that I'll always be fuzzy.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
A brief note on transfer functions and linearity - yes if you had access to the visual transform they are using to blur the faces you most certainly could un-blur them - assuming the transform is linear or could be roughly estimated to be linear. Of course to do that - you would need to find all the faces and the while facial recognition software has come a long way I don't think there is anything out there good enough to pick up blurred faces
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
They should have used Laughing Man logos. You blew it Google.
Microsoft patents the idea of putting a virtual bag over peoples' heads to conceal their identity. Says project manager Chris Farley, "We've been testing the technology on the faces of various women on the NOW website, and it really does the job."
Could these enhanced algorithms be used to blur the faces of the hideous women I bring home from the bar? If not in real time, I'll accept them being blurred in my memory.
Google isn't blurring faces in the photos, but is actually blurring people's faces. Somehow, the Googlebotmobile blurs peoples' faces as it drives by, and so far no one has figured out a way to undo it.
but I am sure the "un-blurred" original ones are still in their servers.
is this the best way to protect people's privacy?
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
... place a banner ad over the blurred image. (I've just patented the idea)
.... so amazingly appropriate
BTW captcha was 'venial'
People can be recognized by their clothes and build and hands and shoes and bags and cars and other people they are with and the locations they visit usually and...
Aside from time factor (I suppose it works 24h/day), what's the big legal difference from what the TV programs do when they show random people, in scenes from the cities or so?
Because, you know, the LAST thing I want to happen when I'm out on a public street is to be seen by millions of invisible people hiding in the Google van.
O HI, I FIXED UR POST, KTHX.
Looks like Google also cares a about horse privacy. That's really great! I woudn't want anyone recognizing my horse if he's caught doing something embarassing out in the street.
If you really want to hide something in a photo, cover it with a single color and flatten the picture. Blurring can't be completely undone, since it destroys information... but depending on *how* blurred it is, it can be at least partially reconstructed.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=smiley+face&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=116.007505,75.410156&ie=UTF8&ll=33.808729,-118.22742&spn=0.002102,0.001151&t=h&z=19
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Generally you can't perfectly reverse a blur operation, it is lossy. It all comes down to which algorithm Google choose to use.
As for which program, you're going to get the best results with a custom-written filter. All the standard photo editors accept custom plugins so any program can be used. Gimp even allows you to write the custom plugin in a scripting language (python?)
Google can choose how well this will work. They're not a bunch of idiots who have never heard of matrix transposition. You can bet they will choose whatever they think is the best compromise between keeping the blurred image true to the original and preventing reversing the operation.
And kids, and vehicles, and visitors...this is such utter crap. "Do no evil" indeed. You can't just say "do no evil", you have to actually do no evil to have any credibility.
we will end no whine before its time
This article from a year ago shows that Google has had public implementations of facial recognition for some time. Simply appending &imgtype=face to a Google image search URL will just show images of faces.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Q: Option A or option B?
A: Yes.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Why blur? Haven't we learned yet that the goal is no information, not less information? O.K., this is probably not one of those cases where someone will go to the trouble of trying to deconvolute the image. But really, just drop a white circle over the face and be done with it. Blurring gains nothing and leaves trace information.
"Uh... yeah, Brain, but where are we going to find rubber pants our size?" --Pinky
A related question. If you had a blur applied to a video, would it be possible to use information from a lot of frames to end up building a 'deblurred' single frame?
First it was censoring in China and now they are censoring in America...Google may as well be run by the Bolshevists
Where is the world is th... ho wait...
No sig for now.
Yes. In fact, their are quite sophisticated tools for doing exactly that. The simplest example I know of is the channel logo removal filter in movie players/video editors. I think mplayer might have it; not sure. More advanced NLV editors have tools to lift objects out of a background, into a separate foreground layer where they can be animated, by reconstructing what should be behind it.
I've got enough qualms about Google doing this as it is, I don't see any reason why they should have started doing this without having this sort of thing in place from the start.
To scour porn for vaginas and penises and blur them. But they don't blur anuses and explosive fecal matter.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
From a signal processing perspective, this is the same as convolving with a Gaussian. And if you take the Fourier transform of that blurred image, you get the transform of the image multiplied by the transform of the Gaussian (which is just another Gaussian). From there all you have to do is divide by this Gaussian, take the inverse transform, and walla, you have the desired non-blurred image. This is called a deconvolution, and I've written code to do this for an image processing class.
There are some caveats. You have to guess how blurred the image is - what focal length is and what not. Noise and compression can kill you, so you need to filter those out first (or limit your deconvolution filter to low frequency content). In addition at the edges of the image (or edge of the blur boundary) information is genuinely lost as the gaussian falls outside the boundary and is discarded.
Focus Magic is a commercial package that refocuses blurred images, and they have some interesting sample photos.
Use their awesome technology to just remove people from streetview entirely? If they removed cars and people it would be a lot easier to view the actual streets (and stuff that should be on a map.).
< hat tinfoil=yes > Most likely this is just a public beta for their super-secret face recognition technology so they'll be able to track all our movements over the web.< /hat >
Oh, one other caveat, is that when you quantize the blurred image (assign each pixels a discrete, say 24-bit, value), you will also loose some information.
:) I was just surprised myself to learn that a blurred image is not the same as a lower resolution image, and so I thought I'd share.
Furthermore, I should mention that given the size of peoples faces, and the amount of blur that Google is likely to use, the entire blurred section will be near enough to the edge to loose significant information, so it is unlikely that much recovery will be possible.
So, nothing I said was really applicable to this situation
Why do people expect privacy on a public street? It is called the "public" for a reason. I do not feel that Google should bother censoring anything that occurs in the public eye.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Too bad privacy is the big thing & not color. Then, they could have done something about the horrible red reflections covering all the photos. But, fixing color isn't the big thing.
And the dial-up Internet access?
I see your point,and agree with it mostly.
Privacy is a matter of degrees. So just because you are in public doesn't mean people should be able to demand your name.
Take into account the fact that there is a tiny portion of people crazy enough to stumble onto somebody and start looking for them.
For example you look at a nearby street view and see a interesting person, and then go to that area to see if you can find them.
You know there are people who will do this.
Now it's google tool, so they can remove anything they like. IT is not a government tool, which would ahve some limitations on what they can remove.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
'The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faeces, then buries them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference...'
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
an intern and gimp 2.4?
... better than Sony's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5OxP1R_KsQ
You should ask, Red Pill or Blue Pill?
Don't waste CPU cycles blurring the image. Just past my face over everyone else's. I don't mind at all! Anyway, people who don't want to be recognised in public should know better that to leave home not wearing a burka.
With all the crazy patents given out in the US, I wonder if someone holds a patent for blurring faces or other obfuscation techniques.
1) Patent obvious idea.
2) Wait for a big companies to use it.
4) Profit!
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
The issue is that Google is publishing identifiable pictures of people without having secured a model release from the people in the picture. Really dumb on Google's part - I wouldn't be surprised if they get still hit with a bunch of lawsuits - what they are doing now is to head off having even more lawsuits filed against them.
Well, the thing is: people are more than happy to jump to conclusions, without having any context for that photo.
E.g., I've waited for a taxi at a street corner before. Admittedly, I'm a guy, but I don't remember any law or moral code that forbids women to use taxis either. So it doesn't take too much of a stretch of imagination to allow for the possibility that those two girls too were just waiting for their ride. Or maybe they went shopping and are waiting for the BF of one of them to come give them a ride home. Or various other possibilities.
We don't actually have enough data to make a judgment there. If they're on the same corner for several hours straight, daily, yes, then they're probably working there. But we don't know that. We have just a snapshot that doesn't really say anything by itself.
But people are more than happy to jump to a conclusion anyway.
The same applies to a lot of other situations.
E.g., it's trivial to take someone's photo that looks like he's walking towards a brothel, when he's just really walking past it.
E.g., the most heinous case of "it's not what it looks" involved a UK chav filming himself pissing on what looked to him like a dead-drunk woman passed out on the side-walk. Turns out that she wasn't drunk, she was just dying of liver failure. (And before you jump to conclusions again, there _are_ ways to get that without being an alcoholic.) So instead of calling an ambulance, the retard filmed himself pissing on her while she was dying, and posted the movie.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
(This is NOT an attempt at trolling)
:D
It really doesn't make sense to me. How does a picture of me, walking down the sidewalk infringe on my privacy ?
People don't want their faces on google maps, because, why again ? The paparazzi ? The neighbors might get a better look at them ? They might be caught taking the dog for a poo without a scooper?
Big freaking deal.
Keep the faces, hell we might find a Bush look-a-like or Bin Laden !
When I saw that, I thought it had something to do with that freaky video I watched seven days ago.
Aw, crap, now my floor is wet.
I wonder if just blurring the faces works. The blurb mentions that they are using an algorithm to find faces, I can only assume they're using another (maybe something even similar to a Photoshop [or GIMP] filter) to do the actual blurring of the pixels. I'm no expert on the subject, but can't this type of blurring be easily undone by computers? Wouldn't it be better to simply destroy the pixels (i.e. set them all to #000000)?
Blurring out human faces is all well and good, but what about all those cats? Won't someone please think of those poor cats who can't even groom themselves or pose with a favored cat toy to make themselves at least presentable? Those poor, POOR KITTIEZ!
Towards the Singularity.
I wonder if their facial recognition will also blur the 'faces' of posters, statues, manikins... I agree that this is something that should be done. Just because you are in public doesn't mean that you have no rights to privacy. What I also find strange is that Google hasn't put their street view in Washington, DC yet.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
While we're at it, let's blast the faces off the statues in our parks.
Can we just prescribe a pill to people voicing these irrational privacy concerns?
tone
Excellent! Now I can have complete privacy from Google Street View by simply covering my house with pictures of faces!
Will their face blurring software, blur the faces of statues, sculptures and paintings ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Why are they blurring faces, but leaving license plates and other identifying information out there for public consumption? I can now see the license plate of the person who cuts me off in traffic every day, search the (cough, ahem) "online database" for their home address and visit them to give them my personal regards.
Are we sure faces is more important at this point? What about stalkers who can abuse this information? (following employees home) Child molesters? People who see which cars pick up which children at the schools and follow their route back to their home? (or search their address, see above).
Won't somebody think of the children!? [tongue in cheek]