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Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

everestpipkin.github.io

181–190 of 410 posts

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

#181
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I'd go a step further and say that if you destroy evidence of someone burning my city down or looting, you're an accomplice to that crime.

I believe you were looking for this term: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/accessory_after_the_fact

Thanks, I think that's a better term.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if our law enforcement had legitimacy and credibility, because then we could know that showing someone’s face would lead to them being arrested and facing a sentence commensurate with what they had done. But unfortunately this is not the case. Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine…

> If we are to trust the cops again, they need to show us they are worthy of trust. And they sure aren’t doing that right now. What I've seen in the past 2 days is that the police are doubling down on being oppressors, not public servants. I expect it to get much worse before it (possibly) gets better. And it may not get better.

This is not fair at all.

Protest turned to riots, literally burning down police stations. Police action wasn't until much later, and they were perfectly fine with the daytime, civil unrest. During the evening, the 'protestors' went home and the agitators came out to fight police, and that's that.

When people are looting every store on a street, the police have no choice but to physically move in. There are very few options for anyone at that point.

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

#183

Timely article, but what about violent criminal activity during protests? Peaceful protests are wonderful and have been very effective throughout history. The protests we've seen for the past few days are not helping anything. Yes, people are angry at the criminal behavior of the police officer/murderer, but manifesting that anger by destroying property, looting, injuring, and threatening others, is only going to jus…

They tried kneeling and it was super effective!!

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

#185
Instead of blurring you should add a significant amount of extraneous information (random noise) and then mosaic (downsample).

If you’d like to have a smooth looking censored image you can then blur the mosaic result to have a smooth transition between the censored and original image.

If you simply blur or simply downsample there’s a significant ability to recover data or iterate over data to recover likely inputs. Other posts have discussed deconvolution, but think of a downsample as a hash - you can build a rainbow table of inputs, easily for numbers, with more difficulty for faces. If you have a limited pool of “suspects” this technique can work well. Just as with hashing, you should add a salt to the image before downsampling or blurring to make recovery of the original input more difficult. In this case the “salt” is random noise.

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

#187

Timely article, but what about violent criminal activity during protests? Peaceful protests are wonderful and have been very effective throughout history. The protests we've seen for the past few days are not helping anything. Yes, people are angry at the criminal behavior of the police officer/murderer, but manifesting that anger by destroying property, looting, injuring, and threatening others, is only going to jus…

Oh, I don't know. Peaceful protests of police violence have been a regular feature of life here in Baltimore, thanks to our famously corrupt and racist PD, but it took the 2015 Freddie Gray protests - which occurred in the wake of the same kind of murder as was done to George Floyd, and were violent enough to garner nationwide coverage - to spark the federal investigation that led to the 2017 consent decree and the ongoing scrutiny that, among other improvements in police behavior and in response to police misbehavior, looks to have so far at least kept Baltimore noticeably absent from the lists of cities seeing significant violence this time around.

So, at least in my town, it looks a lot like violent protests of the sort you decry do help. Certainly nothing else has done as well.

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

#188
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody have any evidence they are connected? I’m not saying thy are or aren’t, but it’s at least worth noting what the police say.

It's not really. Police lie constantly, especially when it would implicate them. Their statements carry zero information except where they provide positive publicly verifiable evidence. Unsettling and sad, but its the truth.

So I’ll take that as a “No, there’s no evidence whatsoever that these are connected. It’s entirely baseless speculation and conspiracy theory.”

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respect to NBC for reporting the African American male victims of homicide (50/65) but not the culprits (14/15). Sometimes the "other side of the story" (as White Supremacists would say) does NOT need to be heard. Not now.

I don't know what your cryptic numerology means, but victims and killers are different categories and can't be directly compared, and being victim of a homicide has a much smaller personal-choice component perpetrator.

Of 65 St Louis homicide victims for the year, 50 were AA males; of the 15 identified killers, 14 were AA males.

I'd caution against implying that this is a choice at all. It's not as if 15 times as many are 'choosing' to murder because of the colour of their skin.

That's why I'm glad this fact was omitted - it's not hard to imagine how it might be misinterpreted or exploited.

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

#190

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…

https://github.com/Y-Vladimir/SmartDeblur

http://smartdeblur.net/

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