ASCII Art Webcam Effect for Linux

Hi everybody, english is not my first language and i'm still learning, sorry for grammar and spelling mistakes.

Like everybody else in this COVID 19 time, in my work we are practicing social distancing, so, all meetings are online. One coworker was using a background filter in Teams and i want to do the same, unfortunately, filters are not available for linux at this moment, so, i implement my own filter (for fun).

While researching how to implement filters, i found this excellent post:

[https://elder.dev/posts/open-source-virtual-background/](https://elder.dev/posts/open-source-virtual-background/)

In this post they use docker whit a model called BodyPix for generating a mask of the background, i did not like this. I remember a model called Deeplab, this model implement semantic image segmentation

[https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/deeplab](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/deeplab)

So, i get a trained model form the model zoo

[https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/research/deeplab/g3doc/model\_zoo.md](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/research/deeplab/g3doc/model_zoo.md)

I implement it and!!!!

[Input Image](https://preview.redd.it/o84z4fl168u41.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f479a8610aba5cd4ab52591307a057098cb7f59)

​

[Deeplab v3 inference Mask](https://preview.redd.it/lxprjze368u41.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9cfe804ad652072d26babb80ae0558c9424b607)

Nice! but i find the borders too big for me, so i apply an erode filter

​

[Deeplab v3 inference Mask + erode](https://preview.redd.it/4ilj0xyr68u41.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=fc6d1b2217e1b2294987e50851c8ccebe78b58d6)

Better. Next step is mix the input and the mask

​

[Input + Mask](https://preview.redd.it/h3a0hff678u41.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=25be4946ab83c20210e96c8eb79d658eb1a51c62)

The result was not perfect (good for the work), the latency was ok whit my nvidia video card.

OK Background removal finished.... What i do now ? well... I love ASCII Art! y and found this cool post:

[https://wshanshan.github.io/python/asciiart/](https://wshanshan.github.io/python/asciiart/)

I implement the ASCII Art transformation function in my code and this is the result:

​

[Result Image](https://preview.redd.it/g0exwg8c88u41.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=fb7a3b169a004cfeb24909446fc33106c6a4290d)

Pretty cool.

So, next step is make this a make this behave like a Webcam, for that, we use pyfakewebcam and v4l2loopback (like in [elder.dev](https://elder.dev) post) and we get this:

[Result in movement](https://reddit.com/link/g5mnfx/video/4ffqnqwg88u41/player)

You can get the source code and install instructions in:

[https://github.com/diegovazquez/ASCIILinuxVirtualWebCam](https://github.com/diegovazquez/ASCIILinuxVirtualWebCam)

Thank you for reading.

https://redd.it/g5mnfx
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Ask your hardware requests here too or try r/linuxhardware!

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[Screenshot 1](https://preview.redd.it/c2j6h776xdu41.png?width=810&format=png&auto=webp&s=8e3672ff47977553d89296f035d1f1655b62f763)

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