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I'm Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale, a software developer in Sydney, Australia. I'm interested in embedded systems and operating system research, code optimisation, 8-bit music, rock climbing, shiny things...

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Tue
Jan 5
2021

A lockdown hair censor for video conferencing

Here in London, we've been in coronavirus lockdown tier ∞+n for a little while now, and I haven't had a decent haircut in quite some time, but I still need to appear on video calls. So I made a hair censor.

The code uses OpenCV, which makes it very simple -- it finds faces using a Haar cascade and then blurs squares in an area around the face. I used v4l2loopback and an OBS plugin to have it show up as a camera under Linux, which meant I could then pipe it into Zoom, Teams, Skype and so on (for some reason I am using all of these).