Art-Inspired AI Face Blurring May Humanize Anonymity

The ability to blur facial identities on video is invaluable for preserving the anonymity of individuals such as whistleblowers, and is arguably essential to a modern Free Press.  The downside of face blurring, unfortunately, is that it robs the speaker of many visible cues of their humanity, which may influence how viewers perceive them negatively, or at the very least decrease the impact of their statements.

A new art-inspired, A.I.-powered method of facial blurring may go some way towards fixing this issue.  The system first identifies major facial features, such as lips and foreheads, allowing for manual adjustment of these features to obscure the identity.  This alone may make the person unrecognizable, but the next steps are where the magic takes place:

Once manual adjustments are made, the A.I. divides the face into geometric planes, called the Picasso or Cubist Approach after the art form that inspired it.  In the final step it adds inky brush lines and strokes, called the Impressionistic or Van Gogh Approach.  This is then applied to every frame of video.

The end result is a form of face blurring that preserves more humanity, as well as being more aesthetically pleasing due to its artistic roots.

This technology may have other applications, as well.  For example, it could be utilized to create anonymized but still humanized videos for Dating Websites, helping users to potentially attract mates who are not solely interested in their looks to the exclusion of their personality, but who would not benefit from traditional scrambled videos (since, after all, physical attraction cannot be rendered totally irrelevant to dating, either).

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning