AI Vision Academy

Access the code of this tutorial, computer vision courses and an exclusive community on AI Vision Academy

• Access to over 50+ source codes from Pysource.com/blog
• Dedicated video courses about computer vision
• Access to an exclusive community of professionals
• Real-World AI Projects – Get hands-on experience building practical AI Computer Vision solutions with a structured path.
• Monthly Coaching Calls – get support and any of your questions answered

Subscribe to our newsletter to learn more

❌

Imagine having to hide the faces of the people who appear in your video. Doing it manually with video editing programs can become a problem if there are too many frames to be edited. What solution can be found?

We can Blur Faces in real-time with Opencv, Mediapipe and Python with a few lines of code and in real-time. We can do it in 2 steps:

1. Identify face location before the blur
2. Take out the face, blur it, and put the face back in the frame
3. Take out the face, blur it, and put the face back in the video

Identify face location before blur face

As always, we must make sure that OpenCV and the Mediapipe library are installed. It can be done simply with “pip install” and the command is identical for all operating systems. In the same way, it is necessary to extract the position and all the points of the face to understand where it must be hidden from time to time. We have already addressed this topic in a previous article, and I invite you to read: Facial Landmarks Detection | with Opencv, Mediapipe and Python .

Also to facilitate the lesson I have prepared and included a file called “facial_landmarks.py” for this project. You can find everything in the download link of this article.

Take out the face, blur it, and put the face back in the frame

To blur faces in real-time with Opencv, Mediapipe, and Python, we need to import Mediapipe, Numpy, Opencv library, and facial_landmarks.py file.

import cv2
import mediapipe as mp
import numpy as np
from facial_landmarks import FaceLandmarks

# Load face landmarks
fl = FaceLandmarks()

We need to derive the face contour using the external points. The convexHull() opencv function helps us with this.

    # 1. Face landmarks detection
    landmarks = fl.get_facial_landmarks(frame)
    convexhull = cv2.convexHull(landmarks)

Drawing a line this is the result

We have to create the mask, using the coordinates of the face, to extract the part of the frame that interests us.

    # 2. Face blurrying
    mask = np.zeros((height, width), np.uint8)
    # cv2.polylines(mask, [convexhull], True, 255, 3)
    cv2.fillConvexPoly(mask, convexhull, 255)

This is the result.

We now have everything we need to extract the face and apply the blur. Again, we’ll use an OpenCV function for Image Blurring: Blur().

    # Extract the face
    frame_copy = cv2.blur(frame_copy, (27, 27))
    face_extracted = cv2.bitwise_and(frame_copy, frame_copy, mask=mask)

This is the result

We must now invert the mask and take only the background excluding the face.

    # Extract background
    background_mask = cv2.bitwise_not(mask)
    background = cv2.bitwise_and(frame, frame, mask=background_mask)

As you can see from the detail of the image, the background is perfectly visible but instead of the face you can see the black color. That is the empty space where we will apply the blurred face in the next step.

The last step is to merge the two masks, and we will do it simply with cv2.add()

    # Final result
    result = cv2.add(background, face_extracted)

Take out the face, blur it, and put the face back in the video

All the previous procedure works on the single image, but as we know, on OpenCV, the video is a sequence of images. With a few changes, we can Blur Faces in real-time with Opencv, Mediapipe and Python.

Let’s first change the source of data acquisition

cap = cv2.VideoCapture("person_walking.mp4")

and all the code we have just seen goes into a loop.

while True:
    ret, frame = cap.read()
    frame = cv2.resize(frame, None, fx=0.5, fy=0.5)
    frame_copy = frame.copy()
    height, width, _ = frame.shape

...