Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

This Program Will Make You Invisible (to Your Webcam)

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 03 2020, @04:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-did-he-go? dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow2736:

This Program Will Make You Invisible (to Your Webcam):

Have you ever fantasized about pulling a vanishing act? One minute you're there, the next you're not. It's a fantasy that comes on especially strong, for me, when I'm stuck in a remote meeting. I'm sitting on my webcam, waiting for everyone to say their piece, and wishing I could just remove myself from the picture. Now, there's a program that will let you do just that.

It's called Disappearing People and it's the work of Google web engineer Jason Mayes. "This code attempts to learn over time the makeup of the background of a video such that I can attempt to remove any humans from the scene," Mayes wrote on his GitHub. "This is all happening in real time, in the browser, using TensorFlow."

[...] It's not perfect. When playing with it, I'd often see the bricked outline of my body moving across my room. It didn't remove me from the picture so much as cover me over with glitchy looking copies of my room. But it happens in real time, and that's still impressive.

Go here if you'd like to try removing yourself from the equation.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
This Program Will Make You Invisible (to Your Webcam) | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 14 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @12:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @12:00PM (#966433)

    No, it was impressive 20 years ago. It's not impressive today. Well, unless you don't know anything about image manipulation. Perhaps then it's impressive. If you ever wanted to build an IR touch screen (there was a minor DIY craze of those around 2007), isolating the moving areas of a video feed and comparing it to that area's background was basically a requirement to get the thing working properly. It's also been in use in all motion detection camera software for many decades.

    What this project does is add an unnecessary Google dependency, but I guess as a senor Google ADVOCATE that's his job. From his personal blurb about himself: "Senior Developer Advocate for Research & Machine Intelligence / TensorFlow.js @google. >15 years experience developing innovative web solutions using new tech." I think he should spend more time looking at old tech rather than poorly reinventing what already exists.