After finding itself in hot water with privacy advocates, Google has begun obscuring the faces of people in its Street View service, which lets users of Google Maps zoom in to view street level images. But the images look decidedly odd, with whole streets peopled by blurred faces.
It needn’t be this way, says Neeraj Kumar of Columbia University, New York. Kumar and his colleagues have developed software that gives everyone a face – just not their own. The software randomly selects 33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com, then picks the most suitable faces for each person in shot. Only the eyes, nose…
