Blurring/privacy for urban research

I might be the only Wildbook user working in urban areas, so this might only apply to me.

I would like for all images submitted by my volunteers to go through a pre-processing stage where any human faces, house numbers, license plates, logos/text are blurred out. My attorney says I’m not legally required to do this, but I feel like it’s a good practice to be respectful of the privacy of residents in the communities where I’ll have projects. I would also like for this step to include a manual review where I’m clicking through images to make sure things got blurred out, and to add a blur to anything missed, or to remove a blur if one of my animals was subjected to an accidental blur.

I had chatted with Jon about this at some point, and it seemed like it was a feature I’d be better off hiring a third party developer to do since custom development time at Wildbook is so limited, and then have it integrated into my Wildbook somehow. It’s on my agenda for things to look into this summer, and I’m hoping there is some tool (possibly even open source?) that could be modified/extended for my purposes, like OpenCV.

Are there any other Wildbook users with a need for a feature like this who would want to split the cost of developing it and integrating it into Wildbook?

This is an interesting idea, but with low-cross application as far as I can think. I’m going to tag some other project leads/admins and see if they can imagine a case where this would help them though.

@Carol, @AFlam, @AndyGersick, @ACWadmin1, @GiannaMinton, @ChrissyTustison

Thanks for looping us in! I don’t think this would apply to our project, but appreciate the ask :slight_smile:

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Hey, sorry for the late response. It’s probably not necessary for the underwater wildbooks. On the rare occasions we get divers in ID shots, their faces aren’t usually too clear anyway, and the masks obscure the rest.

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