Google Street View without people?
The technology now exists to digitally remove any and all traces of a human population from Google Street View. Which, if used, would be either really cool or really damn freaky.
I love Google Street View. Seriously. I remember not so long ago when people would come to your door and sell you aerial photos of your property as taken from a helicopter. And people bought these strange keepsakes in their droves. Now we can all not only see the houses we live in from above for free on the Web, we can also take street level tours of our towns and cities. Which is pretty damn amazing and something we’ve all come to take for granted really quickly.
There are a few issues with Google Street View though, with privacy concerns being the biggest of these. The problem is that as the Google Street View camera cars winds their way merrily around the world, they take photos of people and vehicles that may not want to be identified or published online.
The current solution employed by Google is one of blurring people’s faces and the license plates of vehicles. And that works well. But there is an alternative the search giant could adopt.
As reported by Crave, a science graduate named Arturo Flores has developed an algorithm that scans photos from Google Street View, identifies human beings, and digitally removes them from the landscape. Their presence is masked by a filling in from the colors and textures surrounding their outline.
The test images show the technique works, and Flores has published his findings and demonstrated them at the IEEE Mobile Workshop. All it needs now is for Google to adopt the system, which is not at all guaranteed.
I kind of like the idea of removing people from Google Street View. It would certainly give a better picture of the places on show. But it would also be a little creepy, and it means we’d lose the chance to see those strange, awkward moments caught just as the Google Street View camera cars pass by. Which would be a shame.
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