Note: Due to the nature of censored content, I’m showcasing synthetic data in this post.
Japan has its crazy censorship laws, so most hentai anime uses mosaic censoring to hide the important bits. Of course with my work on Overmix I’m interested in camera pans that can be stitched, and those could look like the following:
What is interesting however is that, while it might not be too apparent at first, the mosaic censor changes from frame to frame. Instead of censoring the image which is panned, a specific area is marked as “dirty” and censoring is applied on each frame separately. So looking even closer, we can see that the mosaics are arranged in a grid which is relative to the viewpoint (i.e. fixed) and not the panned image (which is moving).
So depending on how the panned image is offset from the viewpoint, each tile in the mosaic will cover a different area in different frames. If we take all our frames and find the average for each pixels, we can see a vast improvement already:
It is however quite blurry… However super-resolution have thought us that if we have several images of the same motif but where each image caries slightly different information, we can exploit it to increase the resolution. So let’s try to do better.
Before we can start, we need to know how the mosaic censoring works to finish our degradation model. Contrary to what I thought, it is not done by averaging all pixels inside each tile. Instead it is done by picking a single pixel (which I assume is the center one) and use that for the color of the entire tile.
The approach is therefore really simple. We create a high-resolution (HR) grid, and for each frame we plot the tile color into the HR grid into the pixel located at the center of the tile. When we have done that for all the frames, we end up with the following:
There are a lot of black pixels, these are pixels which were not covered by any of our frames, pixels we know nothing about. There is no way of extracting these pixels from our source images, so we need to fake them by using interpolation. I used the “Inpaint – diffusion” filter in G’MIC and the result isn’t too bad:
Those “missing pixels” fully controls how well the decensoring will work. If the viewpoint only pans in a vertical direction we will only have vertical strips of known pixels, thus we cannot increase the resolution in the horizontal dimension. If we have movement in both dimensions it tends to work pretty well as you can see in the overview image below:
Full image available below: (click to view full resolution)
