[OSM-talk] Face and license blurring (GDPR territories)

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello Christian,

This does indeed look very nice, it's providing much more extensive blurring than what I've tried so far.

Thanks to everyone also for the replies.

Nick
________________________________
From: Christian Quest <cquest at openstreetmap.fr>
Sent: 07 October 2020 09:25
To: talk at openstreetmap.org <talk at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Face and license blurring (GDPR territories)

Le 06/10/2020 à 22:41, Nick Whitelegg a écrit :
Hi,

Apologies if this is only tangentially OSM related, but I thought I'd ask here to try and get some expert advice.

As you may know, Mapillary has been bought by Facebook and there has been interest in developing, or at least starting to develop/actively researching the possibility of, some sort of open source alternative. I have been developing OpenTrailView (opentrailview.org), however I now have a collaborator to work on exploring an open source panos platform.

The main question I have relates to the very necessary privacy steps that must be taken, in particular face and license plate blurring. I have experimented with various libraries using various datasets and models, and have found that the understand.ai Anonymizer (https://github.com/understand-ai/anonymizer), which advertises itself as something specifically aimed at implementing the privacy protections needed to comply with the GDPR, seems to be working the best.

It detects faces and license plates in clear view on panoramas, which can then be blurred.

My question, then, is what to do about people, or cars, which are further away from the camera? In these cases, the algorithm does not necessarily detect the face or license plate, but on the other hand in general the faces and license plates are not clearly visible, or identifiable, in any case.

So in summary, the tool blurs clearly visible faces or license plates, but in general does not blur those which are not clearly visible.

Apologies once again that this is only tangentially related to OSM (OpenTrailView uses OSM to connect panos together, so not completely unrelated) but it is very much an open geodata issue, so I thought I'd ask to get feedback.

I am in the UK and the server is in Germany (Hetzner), so GDPR would apply.

Thanks,
Nick


We have tested blurring using image segmentation which allows to blur full parts of pictures like people and cars, not only faces and license plates.


Here is the result: https://takeitout.cquest.org/photo/cquest/blurred/


The code used is on github: https://github.com/tyndare/blur-persons/


We did some tests using TPU to speedup the process.


--
Christian Quest - OpenStreetMap France
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