Privacy Blurring - Now in the Editor
At Mapillary we do a lot of things with the photos you upload. One thing we do is to automatically blur license plates and peoples faces for privacy purposes. No license plate detector or face detector is perfect and sometimes we will incorrectly blur areas, sometimes we will miss important areas that needed blurring.
Example of incorrect blurring
Enabling manual correction of blurring is one of the most requested features that we have had so far. It is a great thing that our users are concerned about privacy. We promised to do something about it and now we have.
As of now, any user can manually add and remove blur in the editor. This is how it works (a video says more than a thousand words):
Blurring/Unblurring Mapillary from Mapillary on Vimeo.
That means that even though our automatic detectors sometimes fail, together we can make Mapillary a place where privacy is respected.
This looks like an easy feature to build but we actually had to make deep changes in how we handle the results of the detectors for blurring. We are very happy to finally have the feature out and we hope you will like it too.
/johan