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anonymize is a workflow node that de-identifies detected regions in an image or camera frame. It is the destructive counterpart to annotate: where annotate draws on top of preserved pixels, anonymize replaces pixels in each detection region with a mosaic, blur, redaction grid, or solid fill, producing a frame safe to publish to downstream consumers. Execution context is inferred from the upstream graph:
  • Wired downstream of a camera_frame trigger + call_model chain it is compiled into the edge worker and processes the live frame.
  • Wired anywhere else it runs in the cloud workflow runner against an image URL.
Typical chain:
Order matters: anonymise first, annotate second. Reversing would pixelate over the drawn boxes. On the edge side the codegen normalises this ordering automatically regardless of graph order.

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Modes

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Inputs

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Outputs

Cloud chains populate the output fields below. Edge chains publish the filtered frame directly to the camera driver’s frame-filter channel without writing to the node output dict — the workflow inspector shows these fields as cloud_only to make that explicit.

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Edge implementation

When compiled to the edge, anonymize uses cyberwave.vision.blank_persons from the Cyberwave Python SDK. The cloud and edge paths share the same pixel-level algorithm and emit byte-for-byte identical output for the same input frame + detections.

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Privacy fail-closed gate

blank_persons only obscures bounding-box regions for detections in the active target_classes set. On a frame where the model returns zero matching detections (sub-threshold confidence, occluded subject, partial body, transient miss) the helper returns the input frame untouched. To prevent that frame from being published to FILTERED_FRAME_CHANNEL and silently substituted into the WebRTC stream, the generated edge worker wraps the publish:
A missed detection therefore becomes an explicit black frame rather than a raw passthrough — matching the camera driver’s existing fail-closed behaviour for stale and shape-mismatched filtered frames. When multiple anonymize nodes are chained, the gate uses the union of every node’s target_classes. An anonymize node authored with an empty target_classes list is treated as a privacy lockdown — the gate becomes set() so every frame is replaced with black. annotate-only chains have no privacy contract and remain un-gated: boxes drawn over a raw frame is the intended output.

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Privacy caveat

These helpers are designed for casual visual obscuring, not as a cryptographic de-identification primitive:
  • pixelate is reversible by public depixelation models, especially at the default block density.
  • blur with the default kernel is much harder to invert but not impossible.
  • bbox and redact destroy the underlying pixel information (the output contains only the solid fill + grid lines). Prefer redact when you want the destruction to look deliberate (audit trails, public release), bbox when you want a clean uniform mask.
For GDPR-grade de-identification, combine with format-shifting (publish only detection events, not frames) or run the obscured frame through a second irreversible transform.