Microsoft introduces Face Redaction for Azure Media Analytics

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Published onSeptember 12, 2016

published onSeptember 12, 2016

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Video is an increasingly important aspect of modern culture, with smartphones representing billions of handheld video recorders and official video recording by tools such as police body cams becoming ever more prevalent. Often, the subjects of these ubiquitous videos need to be masked for privacy purposes, creating a challenge for anyone who needs to be sure their streamed video isn’t running afoul of privacy regulations.

Microsoft is well aware of this challenge, which is why the company has enabled face redaction capabilities in Azure Media Analytics. As Microsoft puts it inthe announcement on the Azure blog:

Facial redaction works by detecting faces in every frame of video and tracking the face object both forwards and backwards in time, so that the same individual can be blurred from other angles as well.

Redaction is still a difficult for computers to solve and accuracy is not at the level of a real person. It is expected to find false positives and false negatives especially with difficult video such as low light or high movement scenes.

Since automated redaction may not be 100%, we provide a couple of ways to modify the final output.

In addition to a fully automatic mode, there is a two pass workflow which allows the selection/de-selection of found faces via a list of IDs, and to make arbitrary per frame adjustments using a metadata file in JSON format. This workflow is split into ‘Analyze’ and ‘Redact’ modes, as well as a single pass ‘Combined’ mode that runs both in one job.

Head on over to the blog post for before and after video examples, along with some code and other details on how to enable face detection in Azure Media Analytics. You can find out more atthe documentation page, and check out theAzure Media Service blogto keep up with all the news. Get in touch with the team at theUserVoice page, and let us know in the comments if you think face reduction is an important addition to Azure Media Services.

Radu Tyrsina

Radu Tyrsina has been a Windows fan ever since he got his first PC, a Pentium III (a monster at that time).

For most of the kids of his age, the Internet was an amazing way to play and communicate with others, but he was deeply impressed by the flow of information and how easily you can find anything on the web.

Prior to founding Windows Report, this particular curiosity about digital content enabled him to grow a number of sites that helped hundreds of millions reach faster the answer they’re looking for.

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Microsoft introduces Face Redaction for Azure Media Analytics