A system for automatic face obscuration for privacy purposes

This work proposes a method for automatic face obscuration capable of protecting people’s identity. Since face detection heavily benefits from the possibility to exploit tracking, multi-camera people tracking has been integrated with a face detector based on colour clustering and Hough transform. Moreover, the multiple viewpoints provided by multiple cameras are exploited in order to always obtain a good-quality image of the face. The identity of people in different views is kept consistent by means of a geometrical, uncalibrated approach based on homographies. Experimental results show the accuracy of the proposed approach. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.