Ever heard of diminished reality? It’s much like the augmented reality, except instead of using computers to add visuals, it’s about taking things out in real time.

That easy enough with a still image, perhaps, but not so simple with video…  Technical University of Ilmenau’s figured it out, just draw a circle around the object you want to disappear and it practically disappears as the image synthesizer reduces the quality of the image drastically, removes your target and re-enhances in just 40 milliseconds per frame, using object tracking algorithms and guesswork to maintain the illusion as a camera moves around in 3D space. The framework’s presently running on Windows, but the team says they have plans to port it to Android soon.

Pretty impressive … I’m trying to figure out the applications where you wouldn’t have to manually specify the object to clear out … like automatically recognizing and removing cans of Pepsi from any video.