Services / Licence plate blurring
Redact every licence plate, across every frame.
A plate is personal data the moment it can be tied to a keeper. For dashcam, street-level mapping, car-park, and automotive footage we detect plates at any angle, track them through the clip, and irreversibly blur them before the file returns.
- Redaction
- Irreversible, pixel-level
- Detection
- Bounding box + confidence
- Review
- 100% human sign-off
- Scales with
- GPU, not headcount
What it is
Licence plate blurring, defined.
Licence plate blurring is the automatic detection and irreversible obscuring of vehicle registration plates in images or video, so a vehicle and its keeper can no longer be identified. Each plate is located, tracked across frames, and blurred into the output pixels rather than masked with a removable overlay.
What it covers
The cases a naive pass misses.
Recall is decided by the hard detections, not the easy ones — profiles, reflections, small and moving subjects. Those are what the tracking and the human review exist for.
Plates at any angleFront, rear, and oblique plates, including sharply angled and partly occluded views as vehicles pass.
Distant & small platesPlates far down a street or across a car park, tuned to the recall you need rather than only the near ones.
Moving vehiclesPlates tracked through motion and motion blur, so a car crossing frame stays covered end to end.
Reflected & through-glass platesPlates seen in mirrors or through windscreens and windows.
Regional formatsPlate styles across regions and countries, not just a single national format.
At scale
Built to run continuously, not one file at a time.
Throughput scales with the GPU you allocate, so the pass keeps up with a standing feed instead of a person watching clips.
- Volume
- Built for automotive-scale feeds: continuous dashcam and mapping ingest, or one-off archives.
- Recall target
- Set the acceptable miss rate; we report achieved recall on a labelled sample.
- Combine with faces
- Run plate redaction alone, or together with face blurring in a single pass to save a round trip.
- Resolution & rate
- SD through 4K, any frame rate; blur strength scales with plate size.
- Turnaround
- Delivery date quoted per batch; standing pipelines run continuously.
How it works
Detect, track, redact, review, certify.
Detection returns a box and a confidence per region; tracking keeps it covered across frames; the blur is irreversible; a human signs off; and the certificate records it per file.
- 1 · Detect
- A vision model runs on every frame, returning a bounding box and a confidence score for each face, head, licence plate, and legible screen or document it finds.
- 2 · Track
- Boxes are linked across frames into stable tracks, so a subject that turns away, blurs in motion, or leaves and re-enters is covered for the entire time they are on screen — not just the frames they face the camera.
- 3 · Redact
- Each tracked region is irreversibly blurred into the pixel data of the output. There is no separate mask layer, no metadata toggle, and no key that restores the original region.
- 4 · Review
- A human reviewer scrubs the output and confirms no un-consented person or identifier survives in any frame. If a region is uncertain, the clip is held or dropped rather than shipped.
- 5 · Certify
- The detector version, pass timestamp, reviewer ID, and per-file settings are recorded against the clip, so the anonymization claim is checkable per file rather than asserted in a brochure.
See the detection-to-blur pipeline in full on the automatic anonymization page, and the step-by-step method in how to blur faces in video automatically.
What you get back
The output, plus proof it was done.
- Output
- The anonymized footage in your format, with an optional sidecar of plate detections and confidences per frame.
- Certificate
- Per file: detector version, pass timestamp, reviewer ID, and measured plate recall on the sample.
- Source handling
- Anonymized output only with the source deleted, or both returned and nothing retained — recorded in writing.
- Review
- Human confirmation by default; sampled review for very high-volume standing pipelines by agreement.
The guarantees
Irreversible, fails closed, auditable.
Automatic blurring is common. These are the commitments that make the result something your counsel can rely on.
- Irreversible by construction
- Blur is baked into the delivered pixels. No un-redacted master is shipped alongside, and there is no reversible mask or key.
- Fails closed
- When a reviewer is unsure a region is fully covered, the clip is held or discarded — never downgraded and shipped to hit a deadline.
- Consented subjects preserved
- Anyone who signed a release — your operator, your talent — can stay in frame. The pass targets un-consented third parties, not your usable signal.
- Auditable per file
- Every output carries the detector version, timestamp, reviewer sign-off, and redaction settings, so a batch can be spot-checked against its own record.
- You keep the source, or we destroy it
- Your choice, in writing: we return only the anonymized output and securely delete the source, or return both to you and retain nothing.
Where teams use it
Common jobs this service is sent.
- Street-level mapping and 360° capture cleared for public release
- Dashcam and fleet-telematics footage shared with insurers or vendors
- Car-park and forecourt CCTV prepared for analytics
- Automotive perception datasets de-identified for training
- Traffic-study and municipal video disclosed under records law
FAQ
Licence plate blurring — questions teams ask first.
- Are licence plates personal data?
- In many jurisdictions, yes — a plate can be linked to a registered keeper, so it is treated as personal data under regimes like GDPR. That is why mapping, dashcam, and CCTV footage is routinely plate-redacted before it is shared or published. Your counsel makes the call; we give you the auditable redaction record to support it.
- Can you blur plates and faces in the same pass?
- Yes. Plate detection and face detection run together in one pass, so a street or automotive clip comes back with both covered without a second round trip. You choose the classes in the spec.
- Does it handle plates from different countries?
- Yes. The detector is trained across regional plate styles rather than a single national format, and we measure recall per feed so you know it holds for the plates your footage actually contains.
- Is the plate blur reversible?
- No. It is baked into the delivered pixels with no reversible mask or key, exactly like the face pass. If you need the un-redacted source destroyed as well, we do that and record it.
Send a sample for licence plate blurring.
We anonymize a sample, you confirm the classes and recall meet your bar, and then we run the rest to spec with a delivery date. Standing feeds run continuously.