Selective concealment of characters for privacy protection

A method of concealing characters is proposed for degrading legibility of privacy sensitive textual information in natural scene, such as car license plate numbers and name tags. An important property of the proposed method is that it realizes selective concealing of characters, that is, the proposed method degrades legibility of character regions without degrading the quality of non-character regions. This selective concealment is realized because characters have special concealment characteristics. Specifically, character legibility can be degraded by damaging stroke structure by using exemplar-based image in painting, which does not affect non-character regions. Experimental results of qualitative and quantitative evaluations have proven that the selective concealment is practically possible. Furthermore, the quantitative evaluation through a subjective experiment revealed appropriate setups of image in painting for maximizing selective concealment performance.