OpenWanderer Face and License Plate Anonymizer

This is an experimental application to obfuscate faces and license plates in OpenWanderer projects. Note that it makes use of these existing anonymisers:

• understand.ai Anonymizer
• Tyndare blur_persons

Both these libraries are included in this repository for easy installation; I have also modified their code slightly to make it work with this application. The code from these repositories was taken in autumn 2020 (as at Feb 2022, this remains the most recent version for both).

Please see the individual licensing for the two anonymisers. The rest of the code is the OpenWanderer project's own code and is licensed under the LGPL.

What does it do?

It finds all unauthorised panoramas in an OpenWanderer database, and attempts to anonymise them, using one of the above anonymisers. Optionally, you can specify a range of pano IDs in the database to anonymise.

Installation

(Taken from the instructions for understand.ai Anonymizer and modified)

To install the anonymizer just clone this repository, create a new Python virtual environment and install the dependencies.
The sequence of commands to do all this is

python3 -m venv ~/.virtualenvs/anonymizer
source ~/.virtualenvs/anonymizer/bin/activate

git clone https://github.com/openwanderer/anon.git

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

python3 anon.py [-a anonymiser] [-f startPanoID] [-t endPanoID] [-a anonymizer] -i InputImageDirectory -o OutputImageDirectory

• The anonymiser should be either understandai (default) or blur_persons.
• startPanoID and endPanoID define the range of panorama IDs in the database to anonymise. If not specified, all unauthorised panoramas will be anonymised.
• InputImageDirectory is the location of the unanonymised images.
• OutputImageDirectory is the location to write out the anonymised images

Performance

Of the two, blur_persons is the most effective, anonymising almost all visible faces and cars. However it blurs the whole car, not just the license plate - which is not ideal, and critically, it is very slow, taking several minutes to anonymise one panorama.

understandai is much faster, taking a few seconds to anonymise panoramas, and does work on the majority of cases though might miss faces and license plates which are some distance away from the camera. It does only blur the license plate, not the whole car, which is an advantage.