Reducing Mosiac on Japanese Porn
 

I read some interesting ideas on a website about mosaic on videos. It suggested a combination of Virtual Dub and Video Enhancer. The idea is you reduce a decent quality video down to 1/4 or 1/8 size, then you use Video Enhancer to increase the size back up to original size.

I did try this but the results were quite horrible, due to the quality loss in the two programs output conversion it seemed to me. Anyway the idea seemed sound so I tried a simpler, and quicker way: I used VLC to quarter the video size (a compromise, since it was my opinion that 1/8th is too far), keeping the output video rate decently high and not frame converting it. It was able to create a shrunk video in about 1/4 of real time. Then I simply played out that shrunk file using the video card's tv-out again on VLC recording the output to a hard drive dvd recorder. I have to say I think the results were pretty good, vlc itself doing some pretty fine interpolation on the resize. The process reduces the mosiac enormously, though of course you get a somewhat deteriorated picture in general as the down side, but not as bad as you might think!

Next step would be to take just the pixel (ated <- why is that word censored?) area of the small resolution file and edit it into place in the original full size videoclip

This is a very interesting image processing problem. Because the mosaiced regions contents are highly constrained ( eg, you know what's "supposed" to be there ) you can assemble a massive database of good samples, and match to the mosaiced.

It's a neat problem for a student in signals processing . . .

Revisiting this thread, because five years later, the technology is more or less here -- this is a suitable problem for "deep fakes"

So far I haven't seen it used for body parts other than heads, but it would be easier than heads-- you're less attuned to subtleties of genitalia compared with faces!