Privacy

In today’s world, cameras have become a ubiquitous presence. From red light cameras at intersections to security cameras in businesses, even the average household now has cameras installed. Factories are no exception, with security cameras present on nearly every factory floor. Given the prevalence of cameras, it may seem strange that Retrocausal goes to great lengths to protect the privacy of individual workers. However, it is important to understand that Pathfinder’s primary goal is to help identify and improve production processes, not to monitor individual workers.

Robust Facial Blurring or Blackout

In 80% of deployments, our customers are able to mount the camera in such a way that it is only able to capture the operator’s hands and the work surfaces. Operator’s face and any Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is not even visible. For the remaining 20% of cases, we natively provide robust facial blurring that is built into our platform. Our technology works by detecting the facial features of individuals and applying a blur filter to these areas. The algorithm behind the technology is designed to identify and track these features, such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, and then apply a blur filter to the area. 

Our face detection algorithms are built on state-of-the-art Deep Neural Networks (DNN) that are trained on millions of face examples from a variety of camera views, which is why it is able to perform this detection so robustly. This ensures that the faces of individuals in the video or image are blurred out while maintaining the integrity of the image. 

Fixed Region Pixelation

We also provide users with the option to blur or black out a fixed region of the camera view. This enables users to specify regions of camera view that will not be captured. Sometimes customers use this feature to hide scene backgrounds or other stations and work areas which may be irrelevant to workstation activity being understood. Another valuable use of this capability is to exclude a larger part of the worker’s body than just the face. Users specify these pixelation regions by drawing “rectangles” on the camera view in the Device Manager tab on their portal. Once these rectangles are specified, they are automatically excluded before the video stream is ever written to either local storage or cloud storage. 

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Privacy Concerns and Engaging Operators

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