Privacy Concerns for Dual-Use AI Image Clarity Tools
AI tech is a powerful tool. The original photo (left) was cleaned-up with an AI deep learning algorithm (Image source: from Murilo Gustineli) and restoring tremendous clarity.
The AI researchers outline their progress in their white paper Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.04061) and code is available for others to try on their project webpage: https://xinntao.github.io/projects/gfpgan.
The GFP-GAN system (Generative Facial Prior GFP — Generative Adversarial Network GAN), published by Xintao Wang, Yu Li, and Honglun Zhang and Ying Shan, is able to restore images much better than previous AI systems. The results are nothing short of impressive.
As a privacy professional, when I see these transformational examples, I have grave concerns about undesired monitoring of the population and the ability to clean-up distant or low-quality surveillance images, to identify and track a population.
Digital cameras are widely deployed by businesses and governments. A major limitation is the clarity of images at a distance. It becomes very difficult to positively…
