I spent some time refining the face anonymization system. The pixelation effect was completely reworked to produce smoother, better looking results while blurring the faces more accurately (using the previous blur you could sometimes make out the features of the people). I also cleaned up the implementation, making the blur functionality much simpler and easier to maintain and most importantly I made it more reusable for ease of use in the future for more features.
Behind the scenes, I also reorganized the project’s Python environment by removing unused libraries and recreating the virtual environment. Next I am planning to either add support for videos or make the API better by creating more focused routes such as one that only detects faces and other that returns the blur image. I also want to add functionality where the user can select which people to anonymize instead of blurring everybody detected.
After that, I’ll expand beyond simple face anonymization by adding support for automatically detecting and anonymizing other sensitive information, such as license plates, documents, and other personally identifiable content.