28 March, 2025
Manuel Eberhardinger
Patrick Takenaka
Daniel Grießhaber

Publication

Anonymization of Documents for Law Enforcement with Machine Learning

We are happy to share that our PhD students Manuel Eberhardinger, Patrick Takenaka and Daniel Grießhaber presented their joint work on Anonymization of Documents for Law Enforcement with Machine Learning at the 2025 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence in Trondheim, Norway


Abstract

The steadily increasing utilization of data-driven methods and approaches in areas that handle sensitive personal information such as in law enforcement mandates an ever increasing effort in these institutions to comply with data protection guidelines. In this work, we present a system for automatically anonymizing images of scanned documents, reducing manual effort while ensuring data protection compliance. Our method considers the viability of further forensic processing after anonymization by minimizing automatically redacted areas by combining automatic detection of sensitive regions with knowledge from a manually anonymized reference document. Using a self-supervised image model for instance retrieval of the reference document, our approach requires only one anonymized example to efficiently redact all documents of the same type, significantly reducing processing time. We show that our approach outperforms both a purely automatic redaction system and also a naive copy-paste scheme of the reference anonymization to other documents on a hand-crafted dataset of ground truth redactions.

Authors: Manuel Eberhardinger, Patrick Takenaka, Daniel Grießhaber and Johannes Maucher

Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07334