Tjyylli

Sometimes, TV shows censor people's faces with pixels that hide the details, I am wondering if there's a noun for that, because I am trying to say something in an idiomatic way, but I find it hard without being able to refer to it.

For example, look at this sentence:

They removed the censored part, thereby showing the face of the
person who decided to speak in anonymity.

Censored part sounds odd in this context, so is there a better alternative?

When it's done as pixels, we use pixelated and pixelation.

You can write:

• They removed the pixelation, thereby showing the face of the person who decided to speak in anonymity.

Wikipedia gives "pixelization", but pixelate appears more common.

Many will write "pixelated" even when it would be more correct to use another word (eg I News referring to a blurred image as "pixelated"):

• 
  blurred out (if the image is made blurry)


• 
  blacked out (made black)


• 
  blanked out (made black or white)


• blocked out


• 
  masked out (any kind of blurring/rectangle/pixelation which prevents you seeing the face)

So you can have

• They removed the blurring, thereby showing the face ...

If it is actually censorship and not privacy, you can also write

• The removed the censoring/censorship, thereby showing the offensive symbol

Very occasionally you see redaction bar Guardian which would be appropriate for both privacy and censorship. You could certainly write

• They removed the redaction, thereby showing the face ...

"Redaction" is quite a formal word.

You ask if there's a noun for it. There is: pixelation.

So you could say

They removed the pixelation from the face of ... .

You could also use unpixelate or depixelate:

They unpixelated the face of the person ... .

or

They depixelated the face of the person ... .

or

They deobfuscated the face of the person ... .

Of course, you can say unpixelated the video, unpixelated that portion of the video that had obscured the face of ... . Etc.

You can search online and find many examples of unpixelate and depixelate.

That type of censoring is called "pixelation" or "mosaic", so you can say "They removed the censoring mosaic...". Or you could just say "they removed the censorship..."

The "censored part" would refer not to the mosaic, but to the face that was being hidden, or possibly the section of the video that contained censoring. This would not reveal the face that had been hidden.

Note that hiding faces in this way is usually about privacy, not censorship

better alternative: uncensored

Removing a censor is pretty much impossible; the data is lost. Likely what you have is the original uncensored video.

They removed the censored part released the uncensored video which shows the face of a person who had requested anonymity, which was previously obfuscated through the use of [words in the other answers].