What Windows program will blur all faces automatically in video or images?

Once or twice a year I host an event where a few dozen people show up with
kids and family and I want to finally, for the first time, post the
pictures & video on the internet but with all faces blurred so that I don't
have to worry about it (they all know this and they will all be asked first
to approve the blur).

But first, is there something that will do that nowadays automatically?

On Jul 2, 2022, Rudolph Rhein wrote
(in article <t9pfg1$nc3e$1@news.mixmin.net>):

> What Windows program will blur all faces automatically in video or images?
>
> Once or twice a year I host an event where a few dozen people show up with
> kids and family

The Genovese crime family?

> and I want to finally, for the first time, post the
> pictures & video on the internet but with all faces blurred so that I don't
> have to worry about it (they all know this and they will all be asked first
> to approve the blur).
>
> But first, is there something that will do that nowadays automatically?

Rudolph Rhein wrote:
> What Windows program will blur all faces automatically in video or images?
>
> Once or twice a year I host an event where a few dozen people show up with
> kids and family and I want to finally, for the first time, post the
> pictures & video on the internet but with all faces blurred so that I don't
> have to worry about it (they all know this and they will all be asked first
> to approve the blur).
>
> But first, is there something that will do that nowadays automatically?
>

Most apps are for phones - iOs and Android
Windows 10/11 Paint 3D is capable but not straightforward of blurring
pictures and typically relies on using picture tools(brush over,
copy/paste, select area/edit etc.) - Doubtful value since picture by
picture actions are required(too much effort for desired outcome)

--
....w¡ñ§±¤ñ

On 7/2/2022 9:46 AM, ...winston wrote:
> Rudolph Rhein wrote:
>> What Windows program will blur all faces automatically in video or
>> images?
>>
>> Once or twice a year I host an event where a few dozen people show up
>> with
>> kids and family and I want to finally, for the first time, post the
>> pictures & video on the internet but with all faces blurred so that I
>> don't
>> have to worry about it (they all know this and they will all be asked
>> first
>> to approve the blur).
>>
>> But first, is there something that will do that nowadays automatically?
>>
>
> Most apps are for phones - iOs and Android
> Windows 10/11 Paint 3D is capable but not straightforward of blurring
> pictures and typically relies on using picture tools(brush over,
> copy/paste, select area/edit etc.) - Doubtful value since picture by
> picture actions are required(too much effort for desired outcome)
>
>
Try a Google search for "automatic face blurring video software" minus
the quotes. Brought up many offerings but I have not tried any of them
myself.

On 7/2/2022 9:00 AM, Rudolph Rhein wrote:
> What Windows program will blur all faces automatically in video or images?
>
> Once or twice a year I host an event where a few dozen people show up with
> kids and family and I want to finally, for the first time, post the
> pictures & video on the internet but with all faces blurred so that I don't
> have to worry about it (they all know this and they will all be asked first
> to approve the blur).
>
> But first, is there something that will do that nowadays automatically?
>

https://superuser.com/questions/901099/ffmpeg-apply-blur-over-face

"There's the Deface project which splits video into frames,
detects faces using OpenCV and a trained neural network,
and applies a blur to those places."

And don't worry, installing such programs is a zoo and
will test your patience. Your distro might have opencv-GPU
disabled and only opencv-CPU is available (and it runs on
one CPU core instead of all cores), and any such
proposed solution... will be miserably slow.

https://github.com/ORB-HD/deface

Since I did a project involving some of these things recently, usually
what happens is the pulling of dependencies is not perfect,
and you have to pull in some python stuff yourself. You
try to run the program, and immediately it whines
about "some include is missing".

But in terms of approaches, I expect to see words like
"neural network", "OpenCV", "CUDA" or similar, as part
of a solution. You can't do this with "Just C code".

Paul

On 02-07-2022 20:51 GlowingBlueMist <GlowingBlueMist@blackhole.io> wrote:

> Try a Google search for "automatic face blurring video software" minus
> the quotes. Brought up many offerings but I have not tried any of them
> myself.

Just checked and paint.net & krita blur selections on images.

I don't know of anything free that will blur video selections though as the
selection has to move frame by frame and that's going to cost some money.

> I don't know of anything free that will blur video selections though as the
> selection has to move frame by frame and that's going to cost some money.

Shotcut is free (as long as you don't use the Microsoft Store to get it).
<https://shotcut.org/download/>

Microsoft store $10
<https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/shotcut/9PLNFFL3P6LR>

*Shotcut Tutorial: How To Track And Blur A Moving Face Or Object.*
<https://youtu.be/ksNOrhiXUQI>

*How To Censor Faces in Shotcut (Mosaic or Blur)*
<https://youtu.be/B1Tyjs-BdIg>

*How to Blur Face and Objects Using #Shotcut [Tutorial]*
<https://youtu.be/SEgHtp1N7dE>

*Shotcut - Tutorial part 16 - how to blur faces (UPDATED)*
<https://youtu.be/xHja2s_zDR4>
--
Posted out of the goodness of my heart to disseminate useful information.

On 7/6/2022 1:08 PM, mike wrote:
> On 02-07-2022 20:51 GlowingBlueMist <GlowingBlueMist@blackhole.io> wrote:
>
>> Try a Google search for "automatic face blurring video software" minus the quotes.
>> Brought up many offerings but I have not tried any of them myself.
>
> Just checked and paint.net & krita blur selections on images.
>
> I don't know of anything free that will blur video selections though as the
> selection has to move frame by frame and that's going to cost some money.

This works. And it worked exactly like the picture on the page claimed.
I tried a square blur and an elliptic blur, on the example photo.
It processes both movies and individual frames. I installed it in Linux
Mint, and there were perhaps 2GB of downloads (1.5GB is NVidia libraries
which may not have even been used).

https://github.com/ORB-HD/deface

deface city.jpg --boxes --replacewith blur --backend opencv -o anon.jpg

The fun part, was feeding a movie into it.

It took eleven minutes to process a three minute movie. The preferred
backend did not work. The OpenCV fallback worked on the first attempt.
But like a lot of OpenCV, it did not select the video card by default,
it used the CPU. The CPU ran at 800%. If it had been able to use the
video card, I think it would have gone faster.

The interesting part, is the results.

It missed a few faces, in situations where the details of
the face were "abnormal". The models with silver white wigs and
bangs that came down to their eyes, the neural network had trouble
with that. So in some ways, it "works about as good as OCR".
You would need to convert the movie to frames, and "correct"
the frames by adjusting the threshold setting on the fail cases.

So rather than taking eleven minutes, it's probably going to take
an hour or two of post-processing to ensure the job is done right.

You could, of course, adjust the global threshold and let the
tool run for another eleven minutes, without knowing whether it
will help or not. If you adjust the threshold too much, you
get false positives (someones butt will be blurred).

But the automation is a hell of a lot better than doing it
all by hand.

Paul

On 7/7/2022 3:44 AM, Paul wrote:
> On 7/6/2022 1:08 PM, mike wrote:
>> On 02-07-2022 20:51 GlowingBlueMist <GlowingBlueMist@blackhole.io> wrote:
>>
>>> Try a Google search for "automatic face blurring video software" minus the quotes. Brought up many offerings but I have not tried any of them myself.
>>
>> Just checked and paint.net & krita blur selections on images.
>>
>> I don't know of anything free that will blur video selections though as the
>> selection has to move frame by frame and that's going to cost some money.
>
> This works. And it worked exactly like the picture on the page claimed.
> I tried a square blur and an elliptic blur, on the example photo.
> It processes both movies and individual frames. I installed it in Linux
> Mint, and there were perhaps 2GB of downloads (1.5GB is NVidia libraries
> which may not have even been used).
>
>    https://github.com/ORB-HD/deface
>
>    deface city.jpg --boxes --replacewith blur --backend opencv -o anon.jpg
>
> The fun part, was feeding a movie into it.
>
> It took eleven minutes to process a three minute movie. The preferred
> backend did not work. The OpenCV fallback worked on the first attempt.
> But like a lot of OpenCV, it did not select the video card by default,
> it used the CPU. The CPU ran at 800%. If it had been able to use the
> video card, I think it would have gone faster.
>
> The interesting part, is the results.
>
> It missed a few faces, in situations where the details of
> the face were "abnormal". The models with silver white wigs and
> bangs that came down to their eyes, the neural network had trouble
> with that. So in some ways, it "works about as good as OCR".
> You would need to convert the movie to frames, and "correct"
> the frames by adjusting the threshold setting on the fail cases.
>
> So rather than taking eleven minutes, it's probably going to take
> an hour or two of post-processing to ensure the job is done right.
>
> You could, of course, adjust the global threshold and let the
> tool run for another eleven minutes, without knowing whether it
> will help or not. If you adjust the threshold too much, you
> get false positives (someones butt will be blurred).
>
> But the automation is a hell of a lot better than doing it
> all by hand.
>

I think this may be one of the few false positives, where
blurring happened where no face was present.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/PfZ1X3Nz/sample-false-pos.jpg

It missed blurring more faces on some frames, than that.

In this example, when the model raised her arm and obscured
part of her face, the neural network did not recognize
that as a face needing blurring. What is neat though, is
one frame, where a person had the back of their head to
the viewer, and had turned slightly so only a "slice" of face was
visible, and it blurred that one! So it really needs to see
a head in profile, to declare there is a face potentially
visible. It can still blur parts of faces, just not reliably,
as in this example.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/VvBxmq39/missed-this-one.jpg

The size of the ellipse varies from frame to frame, so
it's not clear there is temporal filtering or position/velocity
processing of the ellipses. It cannot really afford to do
too much of that, because of scene changes would catch it
unawares.

This makes the whole idea "distracting" to say the least.
But we did not need an experiment to know that.

Paul