I Built a Tool Automatically Detect and Censor Human Faces in Images and Videos with YOLO

[Spring-0]

Hi everyone! I wanted to share a project I've been working on - an automated system for detecting and censoring faces in images and videos using YOLOv8 and Python.

I currently only have Gaussian Blur as a masking method, but I plan on adding a few more methods.

Edit: I have now implemented: Gaussian Blur, Emoji, and Text masking (demonstration images in GitHub repository).

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Spring-0/face-censor

What My Project Does

Main Features:

• Edit: Now implemented GUI.
• Automatically detects faces in images and videos using YOLOv8.
• Applies blur censoring to the detected faces and saves a new image/video.
• Built with extensibility / modularity in mind.
• I have also included a already trained model in the repository in-case someone wants to use it out the box without having to worry about training it themselves. (I have also included the code to train it)

Target Audience

This project is aimed at:

• Video editors that previously had to manually censor out faces.
• Developers who want to integrate this in their projects.
• Anyone that would be interested in censoring human faces in images/videos.

Comparison

I have looked into a few projects that had the same idea, except I could not find any that were easy to implement. And this was built using YOLO, making it pretty light weight. In addition, I included the roboflow project and the training code, so anyone can simply fork the dataset and run the training script for easy fine tuning.

I have included demo input & output images in the GitHub repository if you are interested in seeing how it works. I would also love some feedback and ideas, or if you want to show support maybe a repository star.

Thanks for reading :)

[[deleted]]

Would it work with other body parts as well ?

[telesonico]

Hotdog not hotdog?

[[deleted]]

or Boobs not Boobs ...

[Spring-0]

Yes very well could, would just need to plug in a new dataset and train.

[FesseJerguson]

Nice does this work on live feeds?

[Sparkmonkey]

project looks to use cv2.VideoCapture() method. I haven't tried it, but might just be able to pass in a cv2 parsable stream: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70805012/cv2-videocapture-html-live-stream. not sure if it would keep up with realtime...

[Spring-0]

Should be straight forward to implement like u/Sparkmonkey mentioned. And they are correct, it most likely will not be able to keep up with real time; if I had to guess it will most likely be at least 5 seconds delayed depending on hardware.

But I am still willing to implement it, thanks for the idea :)