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Erasing Objects From Video In Real Time
Smoothly interpolating away objects in still pictures is impressive enough, but reader geoffbrecker writes with a stunning demonstration from Germany's Technical University of Ilmenau of on-the-fly erasure of selected objects in video. Quoting: "The effect is achieved by an image synthesizer that reduces the image quality, removes the object, and then increases the image quality back up. This all happens within 40 milliseconds, fast enough that the viewer doesn't notice any delay."
We need this built into our televisions to automagically remove those network logo "bugs" and other crap they have started putting on the screen during the shows.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Pretty good, but take note that all the examples where objects sitting on pretty flat colored backgrounds. I'd like to see what happens when you try to remove an object in a complex environment. Like removing a single person standing in a crowd.
This has some frightening ramifications for how much we believe video. Videos similar to the ones Wikileaks leaked, or news videos "live" on scene, could be doctored in near enough to real time that we consumers might never know it. Scary.
It is impressive, but not perfect...you can see shadowing and the outlines of the object when the camera moves in certain angles.
Also, if there is video evidence presented in a courtroom, people should be aware that technology like this exists and it can and will be used.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Great - it'll start off by making eyesore real estate disappear from "live coverage," then be required as a precondition for live celebrity interviews (not just makeup to cover that acne), moving on to inconvenient points to the story that would take too much time and effort to explain, then images which might "disturb the children" (number of student bodies in Tienanmen Square?), and finally develop to ubiquitous studio-in-a-cameras such that we'll have little assurance of whether live coverage is fact or fiction.
Of course that's just pessimism speaking. Really I'm looking forward to watching live reports without those obnoxious people waving at their mothers, or holding up witty slogans about taxation.
... I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.
I can beat that. I can erase everything in the frame in less than 40ms.
Actually, this is really cool. They could generate hype for it by posting a demo on the web of Episode I with Jar Jar erased. They might be able to stave off Lucas's lawyers by calling it a parody, although in this case it would be more like the original was a parody.
Finally, we can restore my childhood memories and eviscerate Jar-Jar from the last batch of Star Wars movies.
Wants two of these. Right now comrade!
Coming soon to a politically active news story near you.
increase image quality?
ChatRoulette, the PG edition.
Perhaps the next BluRay spec should include this technology so that when you watch ET you can select for the walkie-talkies to be erased and your choice of guns/rpg's etc to appear!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Sorry, I started to call bullshit at the "increase the quality back up" sentence. No-one worth their salt in video processing would ever use such a phrase. This makes it equivalent to Bladerunner-esque infinite zooming and Hollywood-style deblurring to a perfect image.
I'm not saying it's not possible, or even not possible in real-time, but that explanation sends all sorts of warning signals to me. Hell, we know you can do stuff like this because Hollywood does it all the time without having to use physical tricks, and there are video processing algorithms that can identify objects easily enough, and from there it's just interpolation over the selected area in real-time (don't forget that "real-time" can just depend on how much computing power you throw at something). It's a photoshop filter applied to every frame, essentially.
The video is neat, but it does have problems with shadows and obviously only works when the prescribed area can be interpolated nicely from those things on the borders of the selected areas (table surface, flat chair surface, etc.) because they avoid doing anything else. I just call complete bullshit on the "put the image quality back up" crap explanation. Tell us what you *really* mean, don't dumb-down for this audience.
FTFA:"It does seem to be thwarted by reflections though; a cell phone removed from a bathroom counter is still visible in the mirror."
"Zoom in on the reflection...ENHANCE!"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
FTA:
Ummmmm, no. The software reads an image with 2 objects, they only deleted one. Maybe the software can only delete one object at a time now. But that's not being "thwarted by reflections," the mirror has nothing to do with it. The software would behave the same if there actually were 2 objects on the screen.
This sentence no verb.
In Stalin's Soviet Russia...
Trolling is a art,
For anyone not wearing augmented reality goggles.
How does it know what to draw beneath the replaced object?
did you forget to take your meds?
comes to life then?
Its bad enough people believe lines said by comedians are the actual lines of some high profile people, how can we hope that people will care enough to know if the video they are seeing is not edited? Hollywood doesn't need the tech to make movies, maybe to "fix" reality shows, but I figure politics is where the mileage comes in.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
We need a name for this process. I suggest "to Jar-Jar." Examples:
They Jar-Jared the cell phone and stapler off the desk.
"Jar-jar the 3-D glasses off the chair."
Al Pacino released the "Actor's cut" of Godfather 3 and Jar-jared himself out of the movie.
I'd like to Jar-jar my ex-girlfriend from my brain.
It was a guy! He Jar-jared his webcam!
This sentence no verb.
Enhance!
removing the nipples and making softporn safe for work
So one step away from TV networks manipulating live video for their own / political masters requirements.
You didn't see it, it never happened. The camera never lies - right!?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
1) Objects must be sitting on a consistent(ish) surface with a low rate of change compared to the object. Desk, Chair, Bathroom, Wall, Hubcap, etc.
2) It doesn't handle strong shadows (or they are not showing us it doing so).
3) It makes the greatest amount of mistakes with the shadows anyway.
Please add anything I missed to future posts.
I would like to see it erase a boat from a choppy sea where there are 5-7 waves for the length of the boat as I expect that to be a pathological case. I would also like to see it erase a discolouration rather than a very different object to see its behaviour. Cool technology though!
Sounds like "the ugliest shirt in the world" from William Gibson's Zero History.
We watched a show we torrented from EZTV the other day and there was a slight blurring going on in the corner where the logo would be - this was all the way through the show . my wife noticed it first and when she commented on it, I thought it was a pretty cool trick.
increases the image quality back up
Recovery of data lost, when image quality was reduced causing irrecoverable loss of information?
If we can 'increase image quality' in real time... then we don't need HD video content anymore. Just use standard definition video signals, and build the 'image quality increase' circuitry into TVs.
Then bandwidth required by channels is reduced, efficiency increase, allowing many more channels, cable operators will make millions in rate increases, with the ability to cram more channels in and force consumers to have them in the package with the channels they really want.
mecoder does this with the -delogo option. It is limited to a specific location. Still, useful to remove those damn channel "bugs".
This is perfect for propaganda peddlers, er news networks, now they can more easily deceive the public.
Hope is the currency of fools
Interesting... http://whitelead.com/jrh/ISPs/index.html
Ten years ago, one of my friends, who works on movies' restoration and coloring, told me that they had software that was able to remove moving objects from a scene.
The idea was to use the whole scene to recreate the missing parts.
I also remember an article on compression.ru, with plugins able to remove logos or subtitles:
http://compression.ru/video/logo_removal/index_en.html
http://compression.ru/video/subtitles_removal/index_en.html
and even TV ads removal:
http://compression.ru/video/tv_commercial_detector/index_en.html
Look at their youtube video youtube video
Shift the youtube to 1:31 , 1:32. Now look at where the things was staying. Those are two yellow stone. But on the video you see it was replaced by two gray stone bits and the SEAMS of the stone align with the rest. In other word it was a part of the image copied over. Can you imagine the complexity of a software to recognize that the SEAM of the stone must be aligned and where to get it ? I doubt it can be done in 40 ms even on dedicated hardware. I betcha it was "helped" manually by the software maker to make it more beautiful.
If people didn't trust the media before... this is really going to give them pause for thought.
Fine..I will say the obvious. ;)
Never again will you need to see a penis in your porn..unless of course you want to in which case I am not judging you.
I can't find the paper at the moment, but I've seen examples of something similar done with a CCTV camera and encryption. It has the advantage of having a fairly fixed view, so it can easily repaint the background in, but the idea was that it recognises and encrypts the imagery of a person in the shot. The CCTV then captures everyone who walks through the shot in case actions need to be reviewed in future (e.g. "did we see a guy matching the vague description of the perpetrator in the area before the crime and can we get a better shot of him?") but without the decryption key then all of the "innocents" have their privacy protected because they're not shown.
Of course, there is the obvious question of "how do you know that someone is in the picture without knowing that they're in the picture? or do you just have to brute-force the video?", but assuming that they can tag an ID and a unique encryption key to a video image of a person then the idea of CCTV that shows nothing until law enforcement decrypt the necessary (and only the necessary) parts is interesting.
"We need this built into our televisions to automagically remove those network logo "bugs" and other crap they have started putting on the screen during the shows." - by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Wednesday October 13, @08:12AM (#33881166)
You mean like how I do to ad banners on webpages by using a custom HOSTS file?
It works "like a dream", in that I don't see ad banners, or get slowed down by them, or infected by them (when they carry malicious script content, and there have been many times over the years this has happened too).
APK
P.S.=> People, I look at it this way: It's my money being paid to stay online, and I want to get the most out of my investment I pay for, efficiency & speed-wise (this means not hauling down annoying or possibly dangerous content like adbanners). You should care in this regards also, because again, after all - it's YOUR MONEY & to a lesser extent, your time (the most precious element of all)... apk
Did anyone else notice the matchbox appeared in the mirror in the video?
I would pay for glasses that remove advertisement from the real world. In fact, I'd pay quite a lot.
Ads are one of the "unseen evils". By now we know that the processing and even the filtering out that our brains do take up more of our awareness than we become aware of. Advertisement has been positively linked to road accidents, for example, as it is a distracting factor.
In any big city today, you are literally bombarded by advertisement, and all of it has been designed by psychological warfare...sorry, "advertisement experts" to be maximally distracting...sorry, "noticeable". It's a huge burden on your mind, and the only reason you don't notice is that the filtering process isn't conscious.
I'd pay quite a bit for a technology that allows me to concentrate on what is actually important and/or interesting in my environment.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What 6 million jews and 2 clowns? I don't see 6 million jews and two clowns.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Pope Benedict XVI has warned that people are in danger of being unable to discern reality from fiction because of new technologies
http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/10/12/1328215
They could generate hype for it by posting a demo on the web of Episode I with Jar Jar erased.
How would making Jar Jar Binks invisible improve The Phantom Menace? He'd still have all his lines. Better would be to re-edit the film to make Binks only a minor character, and that's called The Phantom Edit .
Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.
Sorry, but I now got that new mythtv plugin that replaces any TV appearance of Pope Benedict with Pope Carla.
At :51 in when they remove the box from the sink its still clearly visible in the mirror.
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
If you wish to be seen, but are being spliced out. You could wear several different colored t-shirts over each other or something similar and then take them off to trick the camera at least temporarily. If you want people to see something that is being blocked out, you would have to probably spray them or it with some kind of colorant, or a bright flash of light might also do the trick, maybe some kind of a portable strobe light. This is just off the top of my head.
Somehow l feel like like I shouldn't be giving away these ideas, maybe my tinfoil hat is just making my head itchy...
It should also be possible to insert objects.
Am I the only one who thinks this is the pure horror?
Ok, there might be a few nice cases where this surely is of "good" use but basically all other uses... imagine some NEWS and some editor clicks something he wants gone in the first 5 seconds... and it will be gone in the entire stream. Talking about censoring, filtering out "inappropiate" stuff, filter out people you do not like... etc etc etc.
But what I think is even more disturbing is the written text in that video? Hello?
Yes, people I know you did a very good job there. But you either DID NOT GET AT ALL what you developed there or you do know and think the possible abuse is awesome (in this case, it would be pretty evil).
While I like technology and think that mankind should develop as much as possible to aid it and reach a stage of development any earlier generation could not even think of - this technology makes me shiver.
Racing competitions, NFL, etc. own the copyright to the original footage. They're not going to license broadcast of that footage to any television station which threatens their revenue model, unless the station is going to pay so dearly that their previously existing revenue stream looks paltry in comparison.
Even if the TV stations were to put more cash on the table, they still might not agree to such a practice as it gives a large degree of control to a single party (which means more finiancial risk if the party becomes unable to maintain the agreement).
This sure adds fuel. Assuming the military is always a couple decades above consumer technology, wouldn't it make sense to think the some historic events could had been manipulated already?
A while ago I saw a "documentary" on youtube about NASA manipulating the moon landing videos to remove "stuff" from the streamed video in real time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMax7EGyQSQ/
Doesn't look that crazy any more huh
the algorithm he describes in the video doesn't appear to consider motion across frames. It just treats each frame as a still image. The down side to this is you get some weird glitching occasionally. The upside is that this algorithm should work as well for moving objects as stationary objects, since from the algorithm's perspective, a moving object is no different than a stationary object on a per frame basis. Would have been cool if he had included some moving objects...like a ball rolling across the floor...etc. I have a feeling that this will give new meaning to censorship and the term redacted. Very interesting.
Just not possible to do in realtime:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/comedy-goldmine/make-porn-worksafe.php
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/feature-articles/worksafe-pornmovie.php
(Above links are ONLY TECHNICALLY SFW...)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Imagine an adult film without nipples, belly buttons, etc. - like living and... breathing Barbie and Ken dolls.
Object intesection removal would prove to be particuarly interesting in this capacity.
This will not end well.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
In the video, they explain that they decrease the quality of the image, then erase some part of it, and then "simply" improve the quality again.
However, the last part is a little mystifying...
Anyone (preferably with image processing background) who wants to have a take on this one?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
In addition to dealing with reflections, which I consider just a part of polishing step one, step two will use the position of something in the video as an anchor and substitute the image of something else.
How far off do you think *that* is? I give it two years to the the lab demo with problems.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This research is being heavily underwritten by the Ministry of Truth, which expects to greatly enhance the efficiency of its operations.
FYI here's an open source project that doesn't remove billboards so much as replace them with art in real-time. Builds on Linux/OS X, soon for Android.
Make this Insightful instead of Funny, I too would like Jar Jar erased from history!
Someone make this happen a.s.a.p please and post it to youtube!
Invisibility is an ancient notion and tampering with video as old as the Lumière brothers. What is new here is the trend toward placing these capabilities closer and closer to the camera. Combine such effects with the face detection algorithm that is already in your phone's camera and the original picture can remove or replace individuals from the scene of the crime. "Ground truth" will be ever more difficult to establish.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex gets a whole new level that way.
Also, Jean-Luc Godard, for the 3rd episode at least.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
1.It works with Slashdot comments, too.
2. For example, in line 3 of this comment, I make an extremely poignant and insightful comment:
4. And it's as if it was never there! Powerful stuff.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Nigga brutha, please! Get to Topix African-American Forum! We jive on dis shit!
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm Try there, they have a TOTALLY "complete explanation" of what a custom HOSTS file can do for you, security-wise... it can also be used to speed you up, by avoiding DNS lookup requests (which take longer remotely calling out to a DNS server than calling out to your local hosts file, especially once it is cached by the local diskcache kernel-mode subsystem) and, instead, finding the domainname/hostname-to-IP address equation locally on your harddisk in the HOSTS file (once you "hardcode in" say, your most favorite websites you visit: So, even IF your DNS server goes down or is "dns poisoned" (which DOES happen, see Dan Kaminsky online for this much in fact)? You STILL can reach your fav. sites, and faster to boot!).
See here -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1818930&cid=33904956 ... I explain a great deal about it there to the other fellow Dante I replied to in this very thread exchange. Enjoy!