

Unlogo project: remove logos from videos - xtacy
http://unlogo.org

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julian37
This reminds me of a fairly simple approach to commercial skipping [1] in the
early days of DVRs: the TV station's logo is never visible during commercials
but always during regular programming.

This was for German TV in the 1990s/early 2000s. I've never watched much TV,
neither in Germany nor elsewhere, so I don't know if this applies to TV in
other countries or if it still applies in Germany these days.

Still, I always thought this was a smart solution to an otherwise quite
difficult problem.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping>

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Kliment
There was this idea floating around on some virtual reality forums some years
back about an "adblock for real life" that would work in a very similar way
with a head-mounted display. In terms of pattern recognition it is not at all
difficult. Detection and tracking of a set of images is pretty much a solved
problem in computer vision (doing it reliably in realtime is still somewhat of
a black art). I like how this is framed as an art project, and it's a very
cool proof of concept, though it's an issue that it doesn't black out logos
until after they have been seen, and the blackout box blinking on and off as
the detector passes its threshold only draws attention to those areas. A
practical implementation could use inpainting algorithms (also built into
OpenCV, and even provided in one of the samples) to fill the logoed areas with
background-like texture, so that it's not an obvious "censored" black patch
but a smooth transition.

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chopsueyar
I believe Limor Fried created some type of glasses that would detect refresh
rates of video sources and black out the glasses when viewing the monitor/tv.

No image recognition, though.

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TeMPOraL
If you could look through a (linear) polarizing filter oriented at 45 degrees
from the vertical, you could kill off most of LCD displays. Unfortunately,
sunglasses with polarizer are usually polarized at the wrong angle, so you
have to tilt your head to see the effect (black screens).

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chopsueyar
Her method worked with CRTs, IIRC.

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chopsueyar
Has it been tested on this?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorama>

<http://vimeo.com/10149605>

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danudey
I'd originally thought that the project was to remove those faded 'station id'
logos that TV channels put on videos. It would be great if there were some
kind of functionality in ffmpeg to remove those semitransparent logos either
when the video is first being encoded, or when it's being decoded later to be
displayed.

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zalew
A few months ago we ran into such concept while chatting with a fellow
programmer. But instead, we thought about using such filter to count
appearances of brands in youtube videos. If their product works I bet this
dudes will be bought by some corporateion and their app/filters will be used
for sth like that.

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pbhjpbhj
> _If their product_ [unlogo] *works I bet this dudes will be bought by some
> corporateion and their app/filters will be used for sth like that.

Erm, I bet it will be used to replace company logos/brands with ads/logos of
other companies that have paid the video distributor (YouTube FTW!) instead.

Indeed I'd be highly surprised if this were not the goal all along.

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zalew
_Indeed I'd be highly surprised if this were not the goal all along._

Yeah, I didn't want to put it that way...

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jefftimesten
Jeff Crouse (creator of Unlogo) here. I can guarantee you that is not the
goal. I have been working on open source, hacktivist projects for over 5
years. Please see my website: <http://www.jeffcrouse.info>

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mtw
implementation is ugly

