We have all seen the videos-everyone in the video has their faces blocked except the subject (and sometimes everyone is blocked). How automatic is that? In our school system there are currently 2000 cameras recording everything in every school. They say it can take weeks to redact a video for a parent to see their (and only their) child. It is a lot of work to do manually. Are there automated solutions that do an acceptable job?
Security video does not redact anything. It would defeat the purpose if it did.
So, some person has to review the video and mark the person who they want to track and blur everyone else. I think there are software tools that help with this these days but I do not know.
48,000 hours of video a day - maybe 3/4 has nobody in it, and maybe 2 minutes in a month is made available to the public on web or TV because of some incident, needs faces blurred. I presume there’s face recognition software like what digital cameras use nowadays to autofocus on faces. Or video edit software where you circle an area to blur and the software follows it as it moves.
Face recognition, and also face matching, is standard in open-source video-processing libraries like OpenCV as well as closed projects. It is trivial to edit a video clip to, e.g., detect faces in every frame and replace each rectangle containing a face by digital noise or a smiley face or whatever, using a script—no need to do anything manually. Same for searching 48,000 hours of video for a single individual.
If you just want to do it yourself, you can use an app like ObscuraCam:
https://archive.flossmanuals.net/obscuracam/obscuring-videos.html
Students in school in the US only have limited rights of privacy even as it relates to searches of their property etc. I would think that videos or photos of their persons would have no privacy, eg the same as any other individual in public.
Thanks for the comments.
As for the right of privacy-federal law gives a greater right of privacy to students than almost anyone. I agree that the students are subject to searches, but imagery of children is treated very very carefully. I know for sure that no one except school employees and specific individuals with a legal reason can see any video. For instance, if a parent needs to see a video of their child for some good reason, say the child was injured at school, everyone except that one child must be redacted from the video. Videos of 2 people fighting must look kind of strange since it will appear that one student is fighting a ghost. If a video is subpoenaed for a criminal case, the school must redact everyone else from the video before turning the video over to the police. That is a requirement of the law.
We have high schools here with 2000 students and 80 HD cameras monitoring the students. Makes for a lot of redacting if there is an incident. State law in Louisiana requires the school to install cameras with sound in any special education classroom at the request of a parent. Every student except the one for which the camera was installed must be redacted if the parent wants to see the video. Since the reason for the camera is to detect problems at some unknown time during the school day (say the child says he was hurt in class-or worse a non-verbal student comes home with a bruise) and the kids are moving around, that makes for a major effort. There are several thousand special ed students here.
The school system is coping right now, but if something major happens, it is going to be a major problem.
Why does the parent need the video? Just for lulz? Is this something offered by school systems? Why?
This is security video. It’s not for parents–it’s not theirs to see. It’s for surveillance in case of some criminal (or other) investigation.
I dont really understand what youre tring to get at.
Sounds unlikely.
Federal law? State law? Which state? Can you offer a cite?
What I was trying to get at is what is the most efficient way to redact people from videos. The redaction requirements I gave aren’t the issue-that is what the school system does. They don’t do any of this just for fun. They do it because the law requires them to. As for providing the video to the parents-that is part of the state law that requires the cameras in the first place. The schools and teachers weren’t happy when the law was passed, but now it is considered a great help in protecting teachers and administrators, just like police body cams. Yes it is a pain, but the people (schools and police) using the camera find that it protects them from many charges they would otherwise be in a take my word for it situation. The individual teachers and police may still be unhappy but the administrators who have to make a decision are very happy to have the cameras.
Louisiana. But given this is a school system, I assume the privacy law is federal. I will investigate and try to find a cite.
There are automated algorithms that will do it - there’s even one built into YouTube where you can tell it to redact faces and it gives you a little menu of thumbnails of all the faces it found in the video (it can tell different people apart, so you only have to select each person once) - and then it just puts a tracked blur on the faces of the people you select. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty useful first pass that can then be tweaked with the addition of manual redaction of anything it missed.
And that’s just a web-based tool that works inside of YouTube. I would expect standalone tools (or plugins for popular video editors) to work better still.
Thanks.