Facial Recognition System

Everyone’s got a webcam, and no one is using them to the full potential that the technology currently possesses.  People generally think of them as nothing more than a camera, allowing them to have a face-to-face conversation with family members a thousand miles away or record videos that will ruin their prospects of becoming respected voices in the conservative movement at some point in the future.  However, their true potential lies in their use as another input device, like a keyboard or mouse or, to some extent, a microphone.  The EyeToy for the PS2 showed that a video camera could be used as a controller and Microsoft’s Project Natal promises to extend that concept.

For this project, however, I don’t plan to try to implement direct control.  Instead, I’m going to focus on passive facial recognition.  I want to make a distinction between face detection and face recognition.  Detection is what your digital camera does, where it says “The thing in this box is likely to be a face”.  It doesn’t say whose face it is, just that it’s a face.  I want to do facial recognition, which will determine whose face it is.  With this, the computer will be able to know who is looking at its screen and adjust what it displays on the screen accordingly.

While I could do something constructive and useful, like using this system to display messages of interest for a specific person on a common display screen, my ultimate goal is the Minority Report model of displaying targeted advertising to people as they walk by my cube.  CHA-CHING!

For this, I’ll be returning to OpenCV, the computer vision library that I used for the Pong Robot.  Just like with the speech command, most of the stuff I need to pull this off has already been written and is just waiting for me to pull it together.  I get the sense that this won’t be as straightforward as the voice stuff and will almost definitely produce more spectacular failures.