'Scalable redaction' on Azure

Microsoft has fired up a service called “Azure Media Redactor” that fuzzes faces in videos.

The new service is part of Azure's Media Analytics offering, a suite of tools for handling media at scale.

The Media Redactor is billed as offering “anonymization by blurring the faces of selected individuals, and is ideal for use in public safety and news media scenarios.”

Microsoft explains that as follows:

The use of body worn cameras in policing and public spaces is becoming increasing commonplace, which places a larger burden on these departments when videos are requested for disclosure through Freedom of Information or Public Records acts. Responding to these requests take time and money as the faces of minors or bystanders must be blurred out.

A video with multiple faces can take hours to manually redact just a few minutes of footage. This service can reduce the labor intensive task of manual redaction to just a few simple touchups.

The service can even be tuned to identify individuals so that their faces can be fuzzed, but others appearing in video will be spared pixellation.

Azure Media Redactor at work obscuring only a specified person

So there you have it: our society needs bulk blurring as-a-service. What a time to be alive. ®