EgoBlur: Responsible Innovation in Aria

• Main Authors: Raina, Nikhil, Somasundaram, Guruprasad, Zheng, Kang, Miglani, Sagar, Saarinen, Steve, Meissner, Jeff, Schwesinger, Mark, Pesqueira, Luis, Prasad, Ishita, Miller, Edward, Gupta, Prince, Yan, Mingfei, Newcombe, Richard, Ren, Carl, Parkhi, Omkar M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 24.08.2023
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2308.13093

Project Aria pushes the frontiers of Egocentric AI with large-scale real-world data collection using purposely designed glasses with privacy first approach. To protect the privacy of bystanders being recorded by the glasses, our research protocols are designed to ensure recorded video is processed by an AI anonymization model that removes bystander faces and vehicle license plates. Detected face and license plate regions are processed with a Gaussian blur such that these personal identification information (PII) regions are obscured. This process helps to ensure that anonymized versions of the video is retained for research purposes. In Project Aria, we have developed a state-of-the-art anonymization system EgoBlur. In this paper, we present extensive analysis of EgoBlur on challenging datasets comparing its performance with other state-of-the-art systems from industry and academia including extensive Responsible AI analysis on recently released Casual Conversations V2 dataset.