Google has open sourced its video blurring tool, called Magritte, in an effort to improve user privacy.
Google has been working to roll out additional privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). Magritte is one of those tools that the company has open sourced to help spur wider adoption.
“Today, we are happy to announce an open-source version of an internal project, Magritte, which uses Machine Learning (ML) advances to detect objects using low computational resources, and applies a blur to those objects automatically, as soon as they appear on screen,” the company writes in a blog post. “The tool can blur arbitrary objects, like license plates, and more.
“This code is especially useful for video journalists who want to provide increased privacy assurances. By using this open-source code, videographers can save time in blurring objects from a video, while knowing that the underlying ML algorithm can perform detection across a video with high-accuracy.”
The company has released the source code on GitHub.