Unlogo project: remove logos from videos

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

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.

Has it been tested on this?

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

http://vimeo.com/10149605

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.

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.

implementation is ugly