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iSpeedIMG

Blur license plates in photos

Publish that car photo without exposing every parked vehicle on the street. Plates are detected by an on-device model, blurred in place — with manual regions for anything the model missed. The photo never leaves your device.

How to blur a license plate

  1. 1. Drop the photo in. A compact plate detector (~7 MB, one-time download) scans it locally and marks plates it recognizes.
  2. 2. Every detected plate is blurred in the preview. Untick anything from the list that should stay readable.
  3. 3. Press Draw region and drag over plates the model missed, then Download as PNG or WebP.

The AI, honestly

The detector is a YOLOv9-tiny network fine-tuned purely on license plates and distributed by the MIT-licensed open-image-models project. It was published with a measured 0.94 precision at its native scale — meaning roughly 19 out of 20 predictions it calls are right — while missing some plates on steep angles or unusual formats. It runs on-device via WebGPU or WebAssembly and is served from this same site.

Good at

  • Flat, front-facing plates on cars, trucks and motorcycles in clear light.
  • Several plates across one photo — records for commodity detail shots.
  • Speed: it was built as the lightest member of a detection family.

Weak at

  • Steep angles, extremely distant plates, exotic formats covered in grime.
  • Trailers, boats, e-bikes and other non-standard plates.
  • Guaranteed coverage. Review every photo — the drawn-region mode exists because no detector is perfect.

Output behavior

  • Output keeps the original dimensions. Everything except your regions is untouched.
  • Blur strength adapts to each plate's size — a wide-shot plate gets just as much smear relative to its size as a close-up does.
  • Pixelate mode replaces the smearing with mosaic blocks if that's the house style you're publishing under.
  • The exported file is brand-new — no EXIF metadata (e.g. from the dashcam) comes with it. Combine with Remove EXIF for a fully metadata-clean file.

Privacy

Everything runs in your browser: decode, detection, blur and re-encode. The only network request is the one-time model download from this site. Close the tab and nothing remains.

Browser & device compatibility

  • Every modern browser; WebGPU accelerates it where available (current Chrome/Edge by default), WebAssembly everywhere else.
  • The plate model (~7 MB) downloads once from this site and is cached for future sessions — offline works after that.
  • Huge photos are downscaled for detection and blurred at full resolution.

Troubleshooting

  • "That file type isn't supported" — the file isn't a JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF image.
  • "Your browser couldn't decode this file" — a format this browser can't read (often AVIF on older browsers), or a corrupted file.
  • A plate was missed — press Draw region and drag over it. Two seconds and done; AI detection plus a human check is strictly stronger than either alone.
  • Detected but blur looks weak — raise the strength or switch to Pixelate; the preview re-renders instantly.

Related tools

  • Blur Face — Detect faces and blur them on-device — nothing is ever uploaded.
  • Remove EXIF — Strip EXIF, GPS location and hidden metadata from photos — lossless and private, on-device.
  • Compress Image — Reduce JPG, PNG and WebP file size with quality you control.

Frequently asked questions

How are license plates detected?

A YOLOv9-based detector that was fine-tuned specifically for license plates (MIT-licensed weights from the open-source open-image-models project) runs in your browser. It marks every plate-like region, NMS-cleans the overlaps, and the tool blurs what it found.

Is my photo uploaded?

No. Detection and blurring both happen locally; the plate model (~7 MB, one-time download) is served from this site. Nothing is ever transmitted to a server.

Does it work on plates from every country?

The detector learned from a mix of plate styles, so many shapes are picked up — but there will always be formats and angles it misses, and different states and colors can defeat it. That is why every photo needs a short review, and drawing extra regions over missed plates takes two seconds.

Can a blurred plate still be read?

Not when the job is done right: the blur strength adapts to each plate's size, so a small plate in a wide shot is blurred as hard as a close-up one. Zoom into the preview to verify before you publish — the whole point is to be sure.

Which download format should I use?

PNG is lossless and the safe default. WebP is much smaller with no visible difference. JPEG gets you the smallest file; it re-encodes lossily but for dashcam or vehicle photos the difference is usually invisible.