Blurring faces in Amped Five

Here's some good news from Amped Software about blurring faces in video: "Usually the main task put in front of the forensic video analyst is to process a video or image in order to make the details like a car, face, or other fine details more visible. Since cross-disciplined tasks are becoming much more common, we see that the request can also go in the opposite direction, and the expert is asked to hide sensitive details from the video. In order to preserve the privacy of people not involved in the case, it is often needed to mask faces or license plates from videos which will be shown in courts or given to the media.

Since having this type of capability can lend some additional utility to our customers, we included tools in Amped Five to achieve this result with the filter “Hide Selection”. Since just pixilation does not work for all applications, we have given the user the flexibility to selectively darken, blur or pixelate an area of the image. The area can be static, or can follow a subject of interest along the whole video or just parts of it; as this tool works with our other tools to provide the results needed.

The tracking of the area, person, or object can be done both automatically and manually. While the automatic approach is very effective on simple object such as license plate, often for people and faces it is necessary to use the manual approach which allows a better customization of tracking and ensures accurate results that won’t compromise the privacy or sensitivity of the obscured area.

Even in our manual mode, the process is very quick and effective, as the user just needs to set the area of interest only on some frames where the motion or the subjects has a higher rate of change. The software will automatically calculate intermediate positions on the other frames.

Click here for a quick video that show how easy is to accomplish the desired task of hiding the face of a suspicious subject from a surveillance video."

This is yet another reason to love Amped FIVE. How many more do you need?! :)