monottawa / camiac

A poor man's background blurring solution for Windows

camiac

to be done: insert build badge here

Background blurring is an effective way to both preserve privacy and keep communication effective during video conferencing.

camiac is a simple tool to create a virtual camera (currently on Windows only) which implements a background blurring effect using tensorflow.js and body-pix (https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs-models/tree/master/body-pix).

Disclaimer: this is still work in progress and not ready to use!

Features

• It does not require a green screen, etc - it just works (Disclaimer: at least on my machine)
• Near realtime processing on a halfway modern laptop without a GPU
• Configurable parameters for bodyPix, stored in the user-profile
• Prediction and camera loop are dispatched to have a smooth camera stream even with less FPS on the segmentation process
• Narrator-mode for interactive and bar-raising presentations (okay to be honest it is still WIP)

How it works

• camiac uses the first best camera it finds, captures the video and uses bodyPix for the body segmentation. Then it uses a blur filter to hide the background.
• I was not able to write a DirectShow filter on my on, so camiac just opens a MJPEG Stream on port 8081 and I'm using https://ip-webcam.appspot.com/ to emulate the camera.
• Basically just clone the repository and run yarn dev
• Press CommandOrControl+Y to toggle the narrator-mode

Roadmap (contributors welcome!)

• Make the narrator mode more useful by using a blurred transition to the background
• Support MacOS (contributors welcome!)
• Implement a simple GUI for the settings and which webcam to use
• Implement a TrayIcon
• Handle errors at all and fix some common things: re-enable camera after suspend
• Allow custom backgrounds!
• Packaging, Actions, distribute proper releases
• Create a tampermonkey plugin to emulate a new camera for web-based conferencing
• Allow different camera resolutions
• Track FPS
• Stop processing if app is in background or stream is not used (partially implemented)
• Implement contour tracing and only cutout the contour with the largest area (for narrator-mode)
• Implement a pipeline like approach to allow multiple filters on the same image stream with the final goal to have a simple platform for "webcam fun".

Limitations

• Not all programs allow DirectShow filters -> doesn't work with UWP
• Probably more

Screenshots

Webcam stream example

Narrator mode example

IP Cam settings

Available settings (and defaults)

{
  "configName": "user-preferences",
  "defaults": {
    "httpListenerPort": 8081,
    "mjpegJpegQuality": 0.8,
    "presenter": {
      "width": 640,
      "height": 480,
      "globalShortcut": "CommandOrControl+Y"
    },
    "bodyPix": {
      "architecture": "MobileNetV1",
      "outputStride": 16,
      "multiplier": 0.75,
      "quantBytes": 2,
      "internalResolution": "medium",
      "segmentationThreshold": 0.4,
      "maxDetections": 1,
      "scoreThreshold": 0.8,
      "nmsRadius": 10
    }
  }
}