Speech and Face Recognition

Over Thanksgiving 2009, I embarked on Crazy Weekend Project #2.  With the goal of exploring technologies that would be of use in an unattended informational display screen, I looked at the System.Speech.Recognition namespace in .Net 3.5, as well as facial detection and recognition features in OpenCV.  I found that the speech recognition features were quite easy to use, just a few lines of code and you have an application that can respond to voice commands.  On the facial detection side, I had less immediate success, fighting with stupid library issues more than theoretical or application concerns.  In the end, however, I was able to write an application that was able to recognize characters from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a high degree of success.  I used this technology strictly for good, and applied what I found to remove Wesley Crusher from the episode.

[mediaplayer src=’https://mathpirate.net/hold/LCARS1.wmv’ ]

You can read about my failures and successes here:  https://mathpirate.net/log/category/crazy-weekend-project-2/