How to Blur Faces in a Video from Command Line

By  on  

Privacy is always incredibly important, especially with visual media where you may not have the permission of individuals in the video. If you're filming something in public, it's likely you'll catch someone's face who simply doesn't want or need to be identified. This recently got me to thinking: what's the easiest way to blur faces in a video via command line?

The best open source utility I found for blurring faces in a video was deface. Let's have a look at how you can use deface to blur faces in videos!

Start by downloading Python-based via pip:

python3 -m pip install deface

With deface installed, simply provide the video name and get the output file with blurred faces:

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

The resulting video does an impressive job of blurring out faces of persons walking by in the original recording:

View the resulting video of persons walking down the streets of New York:

The default threshold for face recognition works very well, even on moving subjects. You can experiment with thresholds with the thresh argument, and even draw the thresholds out while debugging:

I downloaded a handful of YouTube videos using my favorite YouTube downloading utility youtube-dl and I was amazed at how well deface did on a variety of visual environments. Faces were identified at a reliable level even at default threshold!

Recent Features

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Zoomer Plugin

    I love to look around the MooTools Forge. As someone that creates lots of plugins, I get a lot of joy out of seeing what other developers are creating and possibly even how I could improve them. One great plugin I've found is...

  • By
    Send Email Notifications for Broken Images Using MooTools AJAX

    One of the little known JavaScript events is the image onError event. This event is triggered when an image 404's out because it doesn't exist. Broken images can make your website look unprofessional and it's important to fix broken images as soon as possible.

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!