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Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

everestpipkin.github.io

361–370 of 410 posts

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#361
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billion dollars of property damage and the targeted destruction of businesses operated by Korean immigrants, but multiplied by a factor that will ensure laughter at the memory of those killed in the '92 race riots? I don't know how you could more charitably interpret the "wish".

tal8d said 3 hours ago> 'A billion dollars of property damage and the targeted destruction of businesses operated by Korean immigrants, but multiplied by a factor that will ensure laughter at the memory of those killed in the '92 race riots? I don't know how you could more charitably interpret the "wish".' I believe you're having problems thinking clearly. Here, in a public forum, you threaten "A billion dollars of p…

> Shouldn't you be taking some medication or, at the least, seeing a psychologist instead of wasting our time here?

Isn't this way below the HN discourse bar?

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#362
post #349
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First-degree is premeditated. Third-degree is depraved-heart ("murder as a result of callous disregard for the value of life"). What evidence supports a first-degree charge? If you want him to walk, charge him with first-degree. Good luck proving premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt. The depraved-heart charge is a slam dunk, and is clearly the right one if you actually want justice.

First degree does require prior intent, but it can be in a very short period of time (minutes, or even seconds). Basically, if you can stop and think about what you're doing at any point and prevent the murder, you can be convicted of 1st degree murder for having carried it through. I think there could be a pretty compelling 1st degree case there, since the officer had Floyd's neck under his knee for so long. He coul…

I understand that, but the prosecutor would have to prove that Chauvin decided he was going to kill Floyd, rather than that he was heartless and ignored the pleas of a man in distress. The latter is in the bag, done, slam dunk. The former is much harder to prove. If the AG thinks he can prove first, he can always add the charge, but it's just good sense to do the initial charge on the slam dunk offense, especially when they needed to get an arrest and charge on the books to calm the rioters.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are _a lot_ of forensic methods to reverse blur techniques" Any examples? You can't reverse it if the data is gone.

If you do something really simple like a Gaussian blur (which is a type of convolution), it might be possible to find the inverse convolution (de-convolution) and restore the original image with some accuracy. One method is the Lucy-Richardson deconvolution [1], which is an iterative algorithm, and here [2] is the best practical example I could find right away. Unfortunately the text is not in English, but the illust…

Yes this is possible before JPEG compression, because convolution removes fairly little information but once you compress using JPEG you remove the frequency components that make it reversible.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does that make you an accomplice, too? Yes, deliberately preventing anyone from providing care or defense for a person who's being murdered makes you an accomplice to the murder. >If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down Doubtful. Here's a video of East 4th street in downtown Cleveland being destroyed by pillagers last night: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/cleveland…

>Yes, deliberately preventing anyone from providing care or defense for a person who's being murdered makes you an accomplice to the murder. Are we in agreement that this was documented as happening, and the other cops present were accomplices in the murder of George Floyd? If so, why do you think they aren't being charged? >Who should the city of Cleveland have charged justly to prevent this? I assumed GP meant Minn…

Semantics... We likely agree on the other officers' responsibility/duty both to police the unlawful/unjustified actions of their colleagues and to protect the life and liberty of Mr. Floyd in this situation.

I think murder requires some threshold of intent deliberation and I'm not very familiar with the details in this incident just yet... but on it's face it's doubtful the officer intended to kill George Floyd and choose a slow, public asphyxiation concealed by the unreasonable/illegal restraint while having him legally detained as a forgery suspect. That, of course, doesn't absolve him of being directly responsibility for this man's death. They are not being charged (yet) because: it's only been a few days, only a very small percentage of crime commission results in charges, having charges at this point in time would have required the suspects to issue charges against themselves/each other and if one of them had that much integrity, George would probably not be dead in the first place, convicting the officer of murder may be difficult, so accessory or accomplice charges will require careful deliberation, information still being gathered, among other reasons.

FWIW, the people filming and/or spectating as George Floyd was killed bare some moral/ethical responsibly for their lack of (or cowardly?) effort to physically interject, although I'm aware many will not agree with me here.

Concerning Tamir Rice, a person called in to report 'a man in a dark hoodie at the park playground, waiving a handgun around pointing it at kids, they think it might just be a realistic looking toy gun' or similar to 911. The dispatcher called a unit to respond but did not include 'think it may be a toy gun' portion of the callers request for a police response. The officer spotted Tamir, standing alone, from 100 yards or more across the open field in the park. The one driving speeded across the field toward Tamir and pulled up close with officer Tim Loehmann in the passenger side, putting him directly in front of Tamir. Allegedly Tamir brandished/pointed/pulled out the gun and officer Loehmann fired in response and fatality wounded/killed the young boy. It was tragic and there were dangerous mistakes made by multiple people but charging the officer who gunned Tamir down with murder would have almost surely resulted in acquittal. Mr. Loehmann then fraudulently concealed his background and got hired as a rookie officer in a small town across the state, then was subsequently fired upon discovery of his past.

The amount of violence, fear, division and destruction I have witnessed in the name of 'Justice for Tamir Rice' is also tragic. Protesters blocking roadways, terrorizing restaurant patrons and vandalizing or destroying uninvolved businesses every time someone else with a similar color skin dies unjustly does not help prevent the CPD from shooting innocence black children.

It seems that 'rules of engagement' between police and civilians have been eroded over time while executive authority has been expanded. This current state of anarchy can be greatly improved with discussion, consensus, enforcement, and public awareness of these rules. Until then some police will continue to act like mobsters and most will accept, take advantage of or enable some level of legal privilege because of their position. Body cams show us that unequal, crony, illegal, racist, and biased enforcement is widespread. Police in America conduct silent home invasions for non violent drug charges, shoot innocent people and pets without consequence (sometimes at a mistaken address), routinely profile otherwise cooperative non violent people as a threat in order to unlawfully discriminate. They point guns at these threatening people with impunity and treat them as hostile while being so threatened by guns that they can justify driving up to a 12 year old in a park with a fake plastic gun and open firing, no words exchanged. This is an area where legal reform and awareness severely needed.

Burning down Wendy's may have influenced a reactionary, politically motivated, premature legal filing. It will probably compound the hardship of those peoples and family's whose jobs and paychecks were destroyed. It will surely hurt a struggling economy and further stress the community by destroying a busy, low-cost prepared food resource and it will deprive the Dave Thomas Foundation of all future donations during a time of intense need.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That can't be done with a blur. In a blur, pixels are merged or averaged together and information is lost. I'd be careful with that assumption. The only thing that really loses information is the discretization back into 0-255 range, and that naturally loses very little information. If you consider the pixels as a large vector of values, you're effectively multiplying it by a matrix (plus discretization afterwards)…

So it would seem we should use a 0.5x + 0.5y blur to be sure to lose information - something that makes the matrix close to singular. Also, how to handle the boundaries? We select a box in the image and blur that; we'd want to handle the boundaries in a way that also makes sure we lose information.

Yes, you could set each pixel in the blurred region to the same color (i.e. each matrix entry is identical) - that could be black or the average of the blurred region. "Pixelation" does the same but in smaller boxes.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#366
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That can't be done with a blur. In a blur, pixels are merged or averaged together and information is lost. I'd be careful with that assumption. The only thing that really loses information is the discretization back into 0-255 range, and that naturally loses very little information. If you consider the pixels as a large vector of values, you're effectively multiplying it by a matrix (plus discretization afterwards)…

What about in the case of a mosaic blur?

The matrix is far from full rank in that case - its rank will be the number of mosaic pieces instead of the number of pixels. If you have 100 pixels per block, you actually lose 99% of the information with this blur.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as deepfakes and "thispersondoesnotexist" started happening I wanted a tool that would replace everyone's face with a auto-generated face just so I could do street photography without feeling like I was invading people's right to obscurity

This is a cool idea. Oh to be a streamer with an auto generated face. Reminds me of A Scanner Darkly.

Should be slowly morphing between different faces, maybe 10 minutes or so per transition. Should be fairly unsettling to watch! :D

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#368
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not keep it transparent! The Gimp for example keeps the underlying colour data, and just sets the opacity to 0. this bug (closed as Expected Behavior) has a demonstration: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/4487

Is PPM a safe round-trip format to remove all metadata and transparency? I'd like to recommend it to a friend and as far as I know it really only contains RGB as text and has no extensions for exif or similar. But after so many gotchas, as listed here in the thread, I'm somewhat paranoid...

ASCII PPM supports comments, so it is possible that EXIF or other identifying information would get written into the comments by some tool.

I have only ever observed PPM comments right at the start of the file, so you could open it in a text editor and remove the comments from the start. Maybe check the very end of the file as well.

Binary PPM does not support comments, so that would be a better solution. PPM documentation here, you want possibly P3 or more likely P6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm#File_formats

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#369
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A replacement for blur could just be black boxes. Seems easy and safe enough.

As soon as deepfakes and "thispersondoesnotexist" started happening I wanted a tool that would replace everyone's face with a auto-generated face just so I could do street photography without feeling like I was invading people's right to obscurity

That's a really interesting idea. I'm not sure what the commercial value would be, but the artistic value (and gain in privacy) would be huge. I'm not sure what you'd do about identifying marks like tattoos, but perhaps that isn't the biggest concern when compared to faces.

Could you train a model with your own face as a start, and then run your photos through an existing consumer face-swap app? Or perhaps use a celebrities likeness? I wonder how much the visual 'likeness' of a stranger is worth.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#370

Some tips to maximise user privacy while deploying this tool: 1) The code, for now, runs locally. This is good. To avoid the possibility of the code being tampered with at a later day (for example, it could be modified to send copies of the image to a server), download the webpage and use the saved copy, not the live copy. 2) Do not use the blur functionality. For maximum privacy, this should be removed from the app…

So based n all the replies, can someone design the most resilient facemask that can never be understood by facial AIs?

Best bet is probably just using a normal looking facemask that is highly reflective in the spectrum the camera sees.
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