Automatically redact PII in images with Amazon Nova

This article demonstrates how Amazon Nova 2 Lite serves as an intelligent coordinator for automatically detecting and redacting personally identifiable information (PII) from images while maintaining regulatory compliance.

• Nova 2 Lite performs initial PII assessment and routes images to specialized tools for textual or visual PII detection
• Amazon Textract extracts text and coordinates; Nova evaluates context to identify sensitive information like addresses and names
• Segment Anything Model (SAM 3) on SageMaker AI produces pixel-level segmentation masks for precise visual PII redaction
• Lambda function merges coordinates and obscures identified PII regions while preserving non-sensitive image content
• Final verification step uses Nova to ensure all PII is removed before moving images to approved folders
• Early-exit routing for PII-free images reduces pipeline costs by avoiding unnecessary downstream service invocations

The serverless pipeline enables organizations to deploy compliant PII redaction at scale without custom model training, supporting edge cases like fingerprints, ID cards, and license plates in arbitrary orientations.