Machine Learning Takes the Embarrassment Out of Videoconference Wardrobe Malfunctions

Telecommuters: tired of the constant embarrassment of showing up to video conferences wearing nothing but your underwear? Save the humiliation and all those pesky trips down to HR with Safe Meeting, the new system that uses the power of artificial intelligence to turn off your camera if you forget that casual Friday isn’t supposed to be that casual.

The following infomercial is brought to you by [Nick Bild], who says the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek but we sense a certain degree of “necessity is the mother of invention” here. It’s true that the sudden throng of remote-work newbies certainly increases the chance of videoconference mishaps and the resulting mortification, so whatever the impetus, Safe Meeting seems like a great idea. It uses a Pi cam connected to a Jetson Nano to capture images of you during videoconferences, which are conducted over another camera. The stream is classified by a convolutional neural net (CNN) that determines whether it can see your underwear. If it can, it makes a REST API call to the conferencing app to turn off the camera. The video below shows it in action, and that it douses the camera quickly enough to spare your modesty.

We shudder to think about how [Nick] developed an underwear-specific training set, but we applaud him for doing so and coming up with a neat application for machine learning. He’s been doing some fun work in this space lately, from monitoring where surfaces have been touched to a 6502-based gesture recognition system.