Students create ‘adblocker for the real world’

Four students have developed glasses that blur brands and advertisements from real life. They use a database of images for that. The glasses are not really user-friendly at the moment.

The students at Penn and Johns Hopkins universities made their own glasses, similar in appearance to virtual reality glasses, which filter out the images. The chip on board the glasses filters images that the camera makes based on a database of advertisements and brands. In the event of a match, advertisements are displayed unrecognizable and blurred on the screen of the glasses.

The glasses are currently still very large and the frame rate of the stream is also very low, making the glasses not at all suitable for daily use. Another limitation is that advertisements and brands must already be in a database before they can be filtered, so the detection is not foolproof. Finally, the glasses seem to have trouble with moving images.

According to the students, the technology can be further developed and the glasses can be made smaller, although it is unclear whether they plan to do so themselves. They used the image recognition sift algorithm, which was implemented using Python and OpenCV. It is not known whether the students were inspired by John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live,