Street Sweeper: Detecting and Removing Cars in Street View Images

Wei-Ta Chu, Ying-Chieh Chao, and Yi-Sheng Chang

Multimedia Computing Laboratory
Dept. of Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Chung Cheng University


1. Introduction

To protect individualsˇ¦ and companiesˇ¦ privacy that may be leaked from street view images, we present a system that automatically detects cars and removes them as if they had never been there. Although street view service providers have made efforts on blurring human faces and license plates, we argue that the remaining features, such as license numbers and phone numbers printed on car bodies could still leak privacy. Given a sequence of street view images, this system first detects cars by the deformable part model, and then determines foreground seeds and background seeds fed to a GrabCut image segmentation module. After removing detected cars, an exemplar-based inpainting method is developed with special designs of filling priority determination and road structure propagation. Hierarchical texture propagation and randomized texture propagation are integrated to implement the inpainting process, so that aesthetically pleasing inpainting results as well as privacy protection can be accomplished.

2. Demonstration

2.1 Datasets

We manually captured Google Street View images along the same street from eight different places to form eight different datasets. Each dataset includes thirty spatially consecutive images, and different datasets have significantly different road situations.

ID

Type

Loc.

Properties

1

Highway

Asia

Traffic marks, crash barrier, fewer cars

2

Highway

Asia

Traffic marks, crash barrier, fewer cars

3

Highway

USA

Traffic marks, crash barrier, more cars

4

Residential area

USA

Trees, buildings, parking cars, tree shadow

5

Residential area

USA

Tree, buildings, parking cars, narrow lanes

6

Tunnel

Asia

Dusky light

7

Inside city

Asia

Complex traffic marks, buildings, intersection of roads

8

Inside city

Asia

Complex traffic marks, buildings, trees

2.2 Original image sequences and inpainting results (Please click thumbnails to see details.)

Sequence 1

Original sequence

Inpainted sequence

Sequence 2
Original sequence
Inpainted sequence
Sequence 3

Original sequence

Inpainted sequence

Sequence 4

Original sequence

Inpainted sequence

Sequence 5

Original sequence

Inpainted sequence

Sequence 6

Original sequence

Inpainted sequence

Sequence 7

Original sequence

Inpainted sequence

Sequence 8

Original sequence

Inpainted sequence

 


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Last Updated: April 16, 2014