street view blur faces

The Google LatLong Blog announced several updates to the images of Manhanttan used in Google Street View. Among the updates, I find their new move to blur out people’s faces to be quite interesting.

We’re also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making — working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery.

They are probably putting Neven Vision (an image recognition technology Google acquired two years ago) in use. Pascal from the GoogleWatchBlog said that the pictures are “a bit out of focus, even if there are no people,” and those new images are indeed a bit blurry when zoomed-in, despite Google claiming that they are now “sharper.” (I am probably comparing apple to orange, so please correct me if I am wrong.)

May 12, 2008 - a sad day for the whole community of Google Street View Stalkers (G.S.V.S) that will always be remembered.