Privacy-centric Image Processing Obscures the Innocent

With more drone surveillance comes more privacy issues. This patent application tries to mitigate the deleterious consequences to balance out the benefits and convenience of this new technology. Just like Google Maps fuzzes out faces and license plates, this invention aims to block out irrelevant data from surveillance footage taken not only by drones, but by CCTV cameras and manned aircraft.

This may be more of a PR patent than anything else, since it’s hard to prove exactly the point when your innocent bystander image was blurred out if the video is declassified, since the general public does not have access to police drone footage.

The first claim is rather broad and may cover existing inventions: “A method of providing obscurant data, comprising:

• receiving image data including an image of a target;
• receiving a preference setting corresponding to the target;
• and determining the obscurant data of at least a portion of the image data corresponding to the target using the received preference setting.”

Title: “IMAGE CAPTURE WITH PRIVACY PROTECTION”

US Patent Application Publication No: 20140140575

Filed (USA): November 19, 2012

Published: May 22, 2014