Architecture of solution for panoramic image blurring in GIS project application

Abstract

Panoramic images captured using laser scanning technologies, which principally produce point clouds, are readily applicable in colorization of point cloud, detailed visual inspection, road defect detection, spatial entities extraction, diverse map creation, etc. This paper underlines the importance of images in modern surveying technologies and different GIS projects at the same time having regard to their anonymization in accordance with law. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a legal framework that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information from individuals who live in the European Union (EU). Namely, it is a legislative requirement that faces of persons and license plates of vehicles in the collected data are blurred. The objective of this paper is to present a novel architecture of the solution for a particular object blurring. The architecture is designed as a pipeline of object detection algorithms that progressively narrows the search space until it detects the objects to be blurred. The methodology was tested on four data sets counting 5000, 10 000, 15 000 and 20 000 panoramic images. The percentage of accuracy, i.e., successfully detected and blurred objects of interest, was higher than 97 % for each data set. Additionally, our aim was to achieve efficiency and broad use.