How to Blur Faces in a Video from Command Line

Privateness is all the time extremely essential, particularly with visible media the place it’s possible you’ll not have the permission of people within the video. Should you’re filming one thing in public, it is possible you will catch somebody’s face who merely would not need or have to be recognized. This not too long ago bought me to pondering: what is the best method to blur faces in a video by way of command line?

The very best open supply utility I discovered for blurring faces in a video was deface. Let’s take a look at how you should use deface to blur faces in movies!

Begin by downloading Python-based by way of pip:

python3 -m pip set up deface

With deface put in, merely present the video identify and get the output file with blurred faces:

sudo deface ./sample-4k-faces-video.mp4
Enter:  ./sample-4k-faces-video.mp4
Output: ./sample-4k-faces-video_anonymized.mp4
100%|█████████████████████████████

The ensuing video does a powerful job of blurring out faces of individuals strolling by within the authentic recording:

View the ensuing video of individuals strolling down the streets of New York:

The default threshold for face recognition works very nicely, even on transferring topics. You’ll be able to experiment with thresholds with the thresh argument, and even draw the thresholds out whereas debugging:

I downloaded a handful of YouTube movies utilizing my favourite YouTube downloading utility youtube-dl and I used to be amazed at how nicely deface did on a wide range of visible environments. Faces had been recognized at a dependable degree even at default threshold!