Gesture Censoring

Inspiration

Recently, one of our members attended a workshop learning how to use MediaPipe to detect hands on a live video which intrigued all of our other members. Thinking about what we could do with this library and our limited experience with coding in our lives so far, we decided that censoring a gesture was something not only interesting but also something practical in this digital age where webcams and video conferencing are becoming more of a norm.

What it does

The program detects any hands on a screen and will censor part of a hand that demonstrates an offensive gesture (can be modified for different gestures but in this case, we used the common western middle finger gesture).

How we built it

We used a MediaPipe library and implemented it into HTML and Javascript so that we could utilize the easy shape building in Javascript. Then, the MediaPipe library keeps the location of parts of a hand, so we used that to calculate distances between points to determine what position the hand was in.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenges were the detection of distances of points even when the hand was close and far which distorted how far fingers were from the par, which we solved by comparing the distances of fingertips to other distances around so that it was always based on the hand instead of just distance. The other problem was that we lost two members of our team which did make the whole project seem tougher, but we made some necessary compromises understanding the limited hands we had working, and attempted to focus more on the project for some time instead of other things.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the teammates is very proud of the fact they made their first real project in programming. It's their first time being part of a whole process of project development and they learned an astounding amount. The other member has had experience in projects before but is experiencing and submitting to a hackathon for the first time which is something they've wanted to experience. We are both glad to have participated and competed in a wonderful competition, and both have learned immensely from it.

What we learned

Both of us learned how to use the MediaPipe library and more about computer vision. The implementation of it made us both curious and hope to utilize it more in the future.

What's next for Gesture Censoring

I hope to make it work more efficiently and accurately, but also to blur or pixelate the area instead of projecting a circle over it. Also, we'd like to be able to implement it into different systems, such as live streaming cameras or web-meeting systems like google meets or zoom.

Built With

• html
• javascript
• mediapipe
• python