Automatic Visual Censoring: from Science-Fiction to Reality..

Despite clear concerns with ethics or privacy, automatic visual censoring is a research area addressing real user needs. While aversion to shocking content is natural, it tends to limit people’s ability to educate themselves or make informed decisions. Our research has focused on images of medical procedures and has shown that existing image-processing techniques can reduce the emotional impact of medical procedure images, while, at the same time, preserving important information. In addition, we have developed a google chrome extension that automatically detects and processes potentially shocking content in the hope that it will help people inform themselves through media that they know they would otherwise find difficult to watch.