Software erases pedestrians from Google Street View

Google Street View is now under scrutiny in Germany, as it doesn’t really go down well with privacy advocates. After all, does the average person on the street have a reasonable limit of expectation to not end up on the Internet within a photo? For those who absolutely love to remain private, a computer science graduate student might have the solution to all anti-Street View people out there – a software which will digitally remove pedestrians from Street View images. Hmmm, the results could be rather unnerving since the software itself isn’t polished yet, depicting areas where people used to be, marked by ghost-like shapes, with some of them even sporting disembodied shoes and feet. The system is smart enough to identify human forms in each Street View shot, erasing them and filling up the space behind with background imagery taken from the shots immediately before or after. Bear in mind this will only work in urban settings, since most of the backgrounds there predominantly flat.