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I've seen this effect before, where everything is blurred except the front most object in the shot. it was possibly a flash or flex effect which worked in realtime with video and snapshots. can anybody shed some light as to what this effect was called or point to some resources? thanks!

UPDATE: So it was the microsoft lifecam show which had this effect built in and can be seen here at the 2:11 mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ujUJU4Wqw

not as clean as i recall, but that's what i'm looking for. Any ideas how this can be achieved in a custom app?

user433575
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2 Answers2

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Apple makes a product like this called Photo Booth. It asks you to step out of the shot while it samples the background. You can apply filtered backdrops, or even video backdrops. When you step back into the picture, the backdrop appears behind you in realtime. It seems to do this by sampling the background color and using those colors to apply a mask to you when you step back in the shot. It's a pretty neat effect. Check it out http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/photo-booth.html.

Aaron
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  • Thanks, but this one didn't require you to step out of the shot.. somehow it just knew the foreground object and blurred the rest. – user433575 Nov 10 '10 at 03:39
  • @user433575 Maybe you can use two captured frames and through a difference mask detect where motion happens and assume that anything which moves is not part of the background. I've seen this kind of approach used in collision detection and it isn't very hard to achieve. – nikc.org Nov 10 '10 at 13:56
  • A simple difference motion map will not work here since the typical map for a moving person usually shows only motion on the edges, but will show little or no motion at the inner areas since the skin color in neighboring regions is usually very similar. Of course there are methods to calculate what pixels are inside and outside, but they are usually a bit more involved. Also, if the person sits completely still it would get blurred out, too. – Quasimondo Nov 10 '10 at 17:34
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There is an face-detection lib. You can handle each video frame blurring all except the face.

Maxim Kachurovskiy
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  • Thanks for the tips, but there is a specific program or flash/flex app that I saw about a year ago and I can't find it! There were tons of effects and background blur was one of them. I'm trying to find out what program/app that was. – user433575 Nov 12 '10 at 08:12