Some people say that the invention of Mosaic is a major “backward step” in the history of human civilization.

Others say that mosaics are a stumbling block to human progress.

In terms of function, Mosaic is a means used to cover the original painting surface, which has advantages and disadvantages.

Technically, Mosaic works by spreading the color of a single pixel over the entire area, causing the original picture to lose information.

So, this process is irreversible.

In the Internet age, where personal privacy is extremely vulnerable, anyone can use mosaics to hide sensitive information in pictures.

For example, ID number, name and address covered by Mosaic can effectively achieve the purpose of protecting information security.

But, in the same way, heavy mosaics are most likely to accompany scenes or violence inappropriate for children in film and television comics.

Even serious pictures can get weird with mosaics.

Although the old driver’s door has long been practiced to the highest level of “natural HD with no code in my heart.” But watching movies big and small is always like scraping off your boots, like knuckles in your throat.

As the saying goes, XX is the first technological productivity. Since mosaics emerged in the human world, some people have naturally focused on coding.

There has long been software that claims to remove mosaics, but most of it is malware that sells dog meat.

However, another artefact that claims to be able to erase mosaics and redisplay the original image has sparked heated discussion at home and abroad recently on Github.

The tool, called Depix, has been tagged with more than 10,000 stars on GitHub in just a few days since its launch, with more than 1.3K branches accumulated so far.

To turn it out of the circle is the following render:

As shown in the picture, the first line is the text content of a huge Mosaic completely pixelated without original traces.

The second line is what the AI restores. You can see that the content has been largely restored with high accuracy.

The third line is the original password based on the second line.

Yes, the most difficult to restore, even theoretically impossible to restore text, Depix after heavy coding has been restored!

This means that even if the sensitive personal information such as name, ID number and phone number is blurred out and posted online, it could be wiped clean.

So how do you achieve this incredible AI reduction technology?

According to the project authors, restoring Mosaic text to the original image using Depix requires only four simple steps:

Select a pixel block from the screen shot as a selection.

Paste the De Bruijn sequence into the desired character in an editor with the same font Settings (including text size, font, color, HSL).

Make a series of screenshots using the same screenshot tool to create a pixelated image.

Run the following command:

python depix.py -p[pixelated rectangle image] -s [search sequence image] -o output.png

We know that coding is a means of image pixelation, that is, blurring the image by reducing the level details of a specific area of the image and destroying the color block.

Linear box filter is one of the common processing algorithms.

As shown in the figure below, after encoding the emoji image, it is actually divided into four color blocks, each color block is covered by the average value of the color block, and finally the pixelated expression is formed.

The filter cannot be reversed directly because the original information is lost.

Depix’s algorithm processes each color block individually using a linear box filter and pixelates each block in the search image to find a direct match.

In short, Depix’s technology works by dividing the contents of the Mosaic area into many small pieces, and then using the algorithm to calculate the average of the contents of each small piece and overlay it.

At present, Depix is a domain-specific tool, only suitable for pixelated images created with linear box filters, and mainly supports English letters, numbers and symbols under the English half corner, etc.

After testing, Depix can correctly recognize most English letters, numbers and symbols.

However, in the course of the research, the developers found that certain sequential characters were not recognized correctly, so improvements should be made.

Although the Depix algorithm’s output is not perfect, it performs well compared to other previous techniques.

The news about Depix aroused heated discussion immediately after it was published on the Internet, with many netizens expressing deep concern.

The developers stress that the AI project was developed not to steal information, but to improve information protection techniques using ECB and plaintext attacks.

In his blog post, he advised people not to use mosaics for safety reasons. The best practice is to directly cover the areas that need to be covered with black or white bars, which cannot be reconstructed by algorithms.

Of course, in addition to Depix, there are many open source projects that attempt to restore Mosaic content.

Previously, extension aficionados also introduced you to an algorithm called PULSE – it can “draw” new faces based on fuzzy Mosaic pixels and transform images in seconds. With a 64-fold increase in original resolution, any slag image quality can be transformed into a high-resolution and realistic image in a matter of seconds.

Restores eyebrows, eyelashes, pores, wrinkles and hair.

There is a lot of skepticism on the Internet about the popularity of such programs. It is inevitable that some people will use these AI technologies for undesirable or illegal purposes.

It can be expected that the techniques for reducing AI mosaics will become more sophisticated, and that the ethical and legal aspects of removing mosaics will become more complex in the future.

I have tried a lot of free text-to-speech software, but the final voice turned out to be very stiff, accidentally found the Microsoft Edge text reading function, turned out to be very good voice effect, worthy of Microsoft! I spent the whole night thinking about how to save the sound, and wrote a tutorial to share with you. There is an audition at the bottom of the article, you can listen to it first and then watch the tutorial.

One

First with MicrosoftEdge find a word more pages, of course, also can ordinary web page, here I am in People’s Daily online news, for example, can’t find a good web page can also use this web page, a link here society.people.com.cn/n1/2021/030… .

Two

Then click the right mouse button and choose “Check”, or directly press “F12”, the same effect will be added to the right side of the page code column, and you can see a “small arrow” circled in the picture.

Three

Click the “small arrow”, you will find where the arrow points to the web page, and the corresponding code will be displayed in the right code bar. Select any text, and the code of the text part will be displayed in the right code area. Double-click the text in the right code area, paste the text you want to convert to voice, and click Enter.

Four

Click Enter to find the text on the left has changed.

Five

Before starting to record, need to the system Settings, the “voice” of open “control panel”, select “hardware and sound”, and then select “manage audio equipment”, then choose “record”, the “microphone” right click disable, stereo mixing right click “enable”, this step can remove the noise in the record, remember to record then back to the original Settings.

Six

Turn on your computer’s built-in tape recorder, tap the large “Record” icon in the center of the screen, and then cut back to Microsoft Edge.

Seven

Select the modified content, right click “Read selected content”, and wait for the recording to finish. Click “Voice options” on the upper right, you can select languages, including simplified Chinese male voice, female voice, Cantonese, and some other languages.

Eight

After recording, click stop. The file is M4A file, which can be converted into a more general MP3 file by using the format factory. At the same time, there is a clipping button in the lower right corner for simple clipping after recording.

Mosaic access: pay attention to the public number “network killer”, background reply keyword “Mosaic” can be obtained