Indian researcher's software gives you another's face to protect online privacy

London, July 29 : With Google's Street View Service under constant scrutiny over privacy issues, a team led by an Indian origin researcher from University of Colombia has come up with a new software that can swap human faces in street pictures taken for the popular mapping service.

Lead researcher Neeraj Kumar and his colleagues have developed software that arbitrarily selects 33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com and then picks the most suitable faces for each person in the shot. Only eyes, nose and mouth are used.

"It matches subject pose, lighting conditions and image resolution," New Scientist quoted Kumar, as saying.

"The selected faces are aligned to common 3D coordinates, corrected for colour and lighting, and blended into the target image," he added.

Unlike earlier face replacement software, which required manual assistance, this new software works automatically,

This software can also be used to change faces of military personnel or eyewitnesses to crime, and help a photographer get a good group picture, by replacing griming faces with better photos of the same people.

ANI