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."

Anonymity

This is the nice thing about living in a town no one cares about/knows about.

Re:Anonymity

Yah, I too live in a small town that Google Street View will never get to. But what I really like about our little town is how much personality it has! I mean, just the other day I saw a couple of college kids driving around down in a little car with this big metal pole with a weird round black thing on top of it sticking out the middle of the roof . Those crazy kids! Must've been some weird fraternity prank or something.

Internet out in bufftuck?

And the dial-up Internet access [slashdot.org]?

Kudos to Google!

It's been awhile since a Google post on Slashdot has focused on the company improving our privacy. Good work!

Re:Kudos to Google!

Well, I don't know... the one about blanking out maps of China sure seems to improve privacy.

Re:Kudos to Google!

IMO governments have to be as transparent as possible for a good reason. It's a different story if you as a "normal" person walk by a brothel or sit in a park (half-) naked. It all depends on the time the google truck passes and I don't see a reason why we have a right to see these people the moment they were photographed...

The government should be as transparent as possible because it is of and for the public.
Walking by a brothel or sitting in a park (half-)naked also happens to be in public.

Why wouldn't "we have a right to see these people the moment they were photographed..." in public?

Re:Kudos to Google!

Well, most people could probably care less about faces. As long as stuff like this [google.com] shows up from time to time.

Re:Kudos to Google!

I agree completely. [google.com] That was taken across the street from my Dad's house. I think I really need to visit my old man more often.

Re:Kudos to Google!

They may have to develop a new recognition tool

Yes!

to blur things like that.

No!

Other uses for this technology

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?

Blurred beyond recognition?

Damn...there goes my 15 minutes of fame.

What privacy concerns?

Google has begun blurring faces in its Street View service, which has spawned privacy concerns since its introduction last year.

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.

Re:What privacy concerns?

My understanding is that people in public should have no expectations of privacy. Or is that just a U.S. thing?

Actually, in the rest of the more civilized world, you're not allowed to look at people without their permission. Just one more way in which the US is lagging behind!

Re:What privacy concerns?

My understanding is that people in public should have no expectations of privacy.

That's an overly simplified view. Are you saying that in public it should be legal to be able to take pictures of anybody from any angle/viewpoint? (eg: upskirt)
Can I take my parabolic microphone and start recording people's conversations 100 meters away and then post the conversations on the Internet?
Why can't people walk around with no clothes on in public if they aren't doing anything weird or being "sexual" (whatever that means)?
If there are no expectations of privacy, then what's the problem? (sarcasm)

I would modify your "no expectations of privacy in public" to "reduced expectations of privacy in public"

Re:What privacy concerns?

You're getting away from the point though. Google isn't taking up-skirt pictures. They aren't using a telephoto lens. They aren't recording private conversations. And no one is walking around naked! Google is taking pictures from a normal vantage point.

Are we going to start going after the newspapers and TV stations too? After all, they take plenty of videos and pictures of places where people and standing around in the background and may not realize that they're being photographed or taped.

Re:What privacy concerns?

It is a gross oversimplification to say that once in public, one should have no expectation of privacy.

People have to go into public to do normal things. This does not mean that any level whatsoever of data gathering on your public activities is acceptable. Certainly would you see the privacy implications if Google were to attach a GPS unit to your car and record where you drive -- sure, you're driving in public, but that does not mean it would be okay for Google to record detailed records of your trips. Likewise it would be inappropriate for Google to follow you with a video camera. Perhaps you don't, but a lot of folks feel that intermittent still images taken by Google's drive-by surveillance crews are also too invasive.

The advancement of photographic and image processing technology has introduced privacy concerns that existing laws could not foresee. The ease with which massive amounts of personally invasive information can be gathered, analyzed, and then distributed in bulk has changed the way we should think about privacy -- even privacy in public.

Awwww

They should have used Laughing Man logos. You blew it Google.

Other applications?

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.

I'm so relieved!

Looks like Google also cares a about horse privacy [google.com]. That's really great! I woudn't want anyone recognizing my horse if he's caught doing something embarassing out in the street.

Re:Can you focus out-of-focus pictures

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.

Re:Can you focus out-of-focus pictures

You can't add pixels that aren't there, and an out of focus picture is effectively a lower resolution.

No, it isn't. Think about an unfocused camera - all the light is still hitting film/CCD, it is just spread out. So from an information theory point of view you haven't lost any data, you just put it into another form. If you consider what would be a single point of light, the energy in that point is spread out in a normal distribution (aka bell curve, aka gaussian). So the blurred image is just all these Gaussians functions overlayed on top of each other. Computer blurring algorithms do pretty much the same thing.

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 [wikipedia.org], 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 [focusmagic.com] is a commercial package that refocuses blurred images, and they have some interesting sample photos.

Re:Can you focus out-of-focus pictures

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.

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 :) 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.

Re:Can you focus out-of-focus pictures

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.

This is wrong. An out of focus picture is not lower resolution. All the original information is still there, it's just been smeared in a mathematically consistent manner - something called the point spread function of the lens [wikipedia.org] at that degree of misfocus. It's very possible to mathematically focus a misfocused picture [focusmagic.com] after it's been shot. The main barriers are not knowing the particular lens' exact point spread function, sensor noise (the de-convolution spreads the sensor noise to adjacent pixels), and grid resolution. But the site I linked to shows you can still get pretty decent results using a generic PSF.

Re:Print a giant face over your storefront

I was just thinking how well this would work with reproductions of faces.

The smiling, friendly faces of your local anchorpersons on that billboard for the nightly news? Blurred.

How about that chimp staring out from that zoo as the Google van went past?

And what about the mannequins in the storefront window?

Invisible watchers...

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.