Comparing The 9 Best Redaction Tools for 2023

Privacy concerns of the public have become a major issue in past few years! 

A survey by Pew Research Center concluded that:

"70% of Americans believe that their personal data is less secure than it was in the past."

Any sensitive data that may include someone’s personal information in digital files needs to be redacted before its disclosure.

Redaction is now a legitimately common practice in this digital era - a compliance requirement that law enforcement agencies & enterprise-level organizations simply can't ignore!

From legal documents to medical records or business-related documents, every organization looks for competent redaction tools to ensure data privacy and integrity.

• Video/Audio Redaction Tools.

• Document Redaction Tools.

With so many vendors all around us, it is quite challenging for agencies to choose the right redaction tool as per their feasible requirements.

If you are seeking an efficient redaction tool that is user-friendly and accurate in results then you are at the right place.

This article will compare the top 9 redaction tools in the market today.

Video Redaction Tools

Video redaction tool is the software that is used to conceal personal information like names, security numbers, ID card numbers, full face, etc., appearing in video footage. Following best practices, video redaction tools must be efficient, credible, able to process different video formats, affordable, and time-efficient.

A few of the video redaction tools are discussed below:

VIDIZMO Redactor

If you are looking for a video redaction tool that saves time and human effort, then VIDIZMO Redactor is one of the smart options available. VIDIZMO Redactor is a video redaction software that empowers organizations to automatically redact sensitive personally identifiable information from videos to ensure compliance with legal laws and regulations.

Redacting objects of interest in videos manually can be a daunting task and time-consuming. Therefore, VIDIZMO makes it easy to detect, track and redact all appearing faces and custom objects, such as license plates and weapons, in no time.

VIDIZMO Redactor is used by organizations in various industries, including law enforcement, healthcare, and education, to protect sensitive information in videos.

VIDIZMO offers both manual and automatic redaction choices to law enforcement agencies, healthcare organizations, legal services, or other organizations.

With VIDIZMO Redaction Software, you can:

• Automatically detect and redact specific objects in videos, e.g., Faces, Screens, license plates, people, and vehicles.

• Store, manage and redact large amounts of audiovisual data.

• Mute or bleep the specific audio clips in audio recordings.

• Follow detected objects frame by frame in a video using artificial intelligence.

• Easily Redact vehicles, guns, and other custom objects present in videos and images through AI.

• Highly secure, fulfills compliance requirements like HIPAA, GDPR, FOIA etc.

• A time-saving tool that enables organizations to redact multiple digital files simultaneously in a quick manner.

• Automatic redaction with manual redaction capability increases the redaction process's accuracy and minimizes errors.

• Transcription in up to 40 languages and translation in more than 50 languages of audio and video files.

• Flexible range of deployment options, on-premises, on the commercial/ government cloud (Azure/AWS) or hybrid infrastructure.

CaseGuard

Like VIDIZMO, CaseGuard extends its suite of services to encompass redaction options, tailored to meet the discerning needs of law enforcement agencies, esteemed healthcare organizations, specialized legal services, and a diverse array of enterprises.

• Automatically detect and redact specific objects in videos, e.g., Faces, Screens, license plates, people, and vehicles.

• Draw shapes over objects and then track specific moving objects in video footage.

• Manually select what you want to redact and highlight people and objects in videos.

• Transcribe video files in up to 40 different languages with automatic transcription options.

• Redact audio recordings as well.

• Redact personal sensitive information shown in various images automatically.

• Accurately remove sensitive, personally identifiable information in PDF documents.

• It lacks security features as you can import or export videos from any source, posing security risks.

• Deployment options are limited. It’s a local application, not cloud-based.

Sighthound

Sighthound automatically obscures people, faces, vehicles, and license plates and allows manual editing as well. It is compatible with Windows Desktop, Linux, Windows servers, or cloud services. It offers automated redactions with full API support.

Sighthound Redactor 4.0 has the following features:

• Automatic Redaction of people, faces, vehicles, and license plates in videos with human editing options.

• Multiple Detection types.

• Track objects in each video frame throughout the video automatically.

• Audio Redaction.

• Deployment options: Desktop, Client Server, Cloud-based.

• Lacks Document Redaction.

• No transcription and translation option.

FastRedaction

FastRedaction presents the following redaction features.

• Automatic Redaction of videos.

• Easy to use redaction tool.

• Highly secure.

• Audio files redaction.

• Time-efficient, accurate. Reduce redaction time.

• Cost-effective.

• Videos are protected from unauthorized access.

• Follow objects within videos by a powerful tracker.

• No Document redaction.

PATROLEYES

• It is fast and simple.

• Automatic face and object detection.

• Can track hundreds of faces at once.

• Automatic face and body redaction with multiple blur options.

• Audio redaction.

• No document or image redaction.

For more information: Comparing The 7 Best video Redaction Software

Document Redaction Tools

A document redaction tool is software that is used to remove sensitive personal information that identifies a person from documents. Some of the cost-effective and popular document redaction tools are discussed below.

PDFelement

Wondershare PDFelement allows the permanent removal of sensitive information from PDF documents.

This redaction tool easily edits PDF documents with a variety of features. You can create, edit, convert, organize, and annotate your PDF files conveniently. Some of its interesting features include:

• Edit PDF documents by adding text, links, images, or shapes.

• Highlight, underline, add comments or draw shapes over PDF documents.

• Convert multiple Word, Excel, and PNG files to PDF simultaneously.

• Organize PDF files by merging, splitting, or rotating PDF pages.

• Password protection of PDF Files.

ObjectiveREDACT

ObjectiveREDACT is the on-premises, easy-to-use Redaction software that redacts PDF, Word, or Excel documents for organizations. It offers 3 redaction methods: structured, unstructured, and freestyle. It uses OCR to search and redact words or even phrases quickly.

Key features are as follows:

• Quick OCR search for words, phrases or patterns.

• Automatic redaction of structured documents.

• Add annotations in the form of notes, text, etc.

• Redacts large, complex documents rapidly and saves time.

Folding Space Automated Redaction Manager (ARM)

It is a compliant automated redaction system capable of redacting vast amounts of documents. It is a safe, secure, and highly recommended automated redaction system for documents.

Features are as follows:

• Redact all types of files, documents, records, and data sources.

• Search, view, or delete any sort of confidential, sensitive information within the documents.

• Identify sensitive data automatically within the documents.

• Secure storage of redacted and original documents.

RapidRedact

Another option for the document redaction tool is RapidRedact. It is fast, easy-to-use, user-friendly software for document redaction. It has the abilities to:

• Remove personal data from PDF, MSWord, Excel, and Outlook files.

• Use OCR for scanning documents and images before the redaction process.

Conclusion

Within the last couple of years, Artificial Intelligence has boomed a lot. It is feeding the technologies to be more accurate in results. The cognitive truths expressed in AI and Machine Learning Systems are not new either. So, AI-based tools would be more effective and accurate as compared to other tools.

VIDIZMO Redactor is accurate and easy-to-use software. Furthermore, VIDIZMO offers a complete IDC Recognized Digital Evidence Management System that enables agencies to ingest, manage, share, and analyze digital data collected from various sources, e.g., dashcams, body cameras, and drones cameras, securely.

VIDIZMO DEMS provides AI-based features such as facial detection, object tracking, automatic multi-lingual transcription, and more.

Learn more about VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System.

Redaction tools are just one part of the topic. For more information, do check out our detailed guide on redaction.

Feel free to contact us!