Patent ID: 8725751

Claim:
An apparatus for blurring unwanted image features, the apparatus comprising: a memory for storing and providing access to instructions and data; a processor for executing said instructions; a browsing application comprising instructions for accessing and displaying web pages including images; a customized image feature database for storing a set of unwanted image features which is customized for a user; a common image feature database for storing commonly unwanted image features and a list of the commonly unwanted image features, receiving a request for commonly unwanted image features from the user, and providing the requested commonly unwanted image features to the customized image feature database for storage therein; a feature extractor for receiving and processing input images from the user and the images of the web pages, extracting image features from the input images from the user and from the images of the web pages, wherein the extracting is performed using a content-adaptive technique, providing the image features extracted from the input images to the customized image feature database for storage therein, and providing the image features extracted from the images of the web pages to an image similarity comparator; the image similarity comparator which compares, using least squares correlation, the image features extracted from the images of the web pages against the set of unwanted image features in the customized image feature database and which provides results of said comparison to an image blurring component; and the image blurring component which, upon receiving an indication from the image similarity comparator that a feature in an image of a web page matches an unwanted image feature in the customized image database, blurs the unwanted image feature in the image before the image is displayed by the browsing application.