After finding itself in hot water with privacy advocates, Google has begun obscuring the faces of people in its Street View service, which lets users of Google Maps zoom in to view street level images. But the images look decidedly odd, with whole streets peopled by blurred faces.
It needn鈥檛 be this way, says Neeraj Kumar of Columbia University, New York. Kumar and his colleagues have developed software that gives everyone a face 鈥� just not their own. The software randomly selects 33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com, then picks the most suitable faces for each person in shot. Only the eyes, nose and mouth are used, resulting in a composite image of the two people. 鈥淚t matches subject pose, lighting conditions and image resolution,鈥� says Kumar. 鈥淭he selected faces are aligned to common 3D coordinates, corrected for colour and lighting, and blended into the target image.鈥�
The end result is a convincing face rather than a blur, although the team鈥檚 images () can be spooky, especially when people get features from the opposite sex. What鈥檚 more, the software works automatically. 鈥淧revious face replacement software required manual assistance, much like editing an image in Photoshop,鈥� says Kumar.
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Aside from Street View, the system could be used to obscure the faces of military personnel or eyewitnesses to crime. It could also allow amateur photographers to improve group shots, by replacing frowning faces with better photos of the same people.
