Gravitonic
Andrei Zmievski

05-October-2005
Recognize This

Face recognition technology is getting really good. Yesterday I saw a link to Intel's OpenCV library float through the mailing list at work and a note that someone wrote a PHP extension for it. "Interesting", I thought. I hacked up a simple PHP script that would take an image and process it slightly to make detected regions more obvious. Here's an example of the output. Not bad, huh? Then Jeremy tried another image, with some spooky results. Note that aside from the person, there are a couple more regions that the library thought was a face. If you look closer, the larger rectangle on the carpet encloses something that does have vague face-like features. Nice job, Intel.

Posted at 11:29 | Tech
Comments

Interesting...is there a URL for the PHP extension?

Posted by Mike on October 5, 2005 12:30 PM

The one I used is Yahoo! internal one. I don't know if there is a public one, but it wouldn't be too hard to make something like that.

Posted by Andrei on October 5, 2005 12:46 PM

Let's see if I'm as good as the library: that's Tatiana, you, Shelly, and Jeff. What did it think? :)

Posted by Adam Trachtenberg on October 5, 2005 01:21 PM

Now is php extension for free download?

Posted by Andrei on October 6, 2005 01:04 AM

That is incredibly interesting. I would really be interested in the PHP library for that

Posted by Steph on October 6, 2005 06:19 AM

Oui, je suis très impatient aussi ;)

Posted by Mathieu (France) on October 7, 2005 01:35 AM

bonjour
mais ou peux t on la télécharger cette librayry pour php?
merci
Olivier

Posted by rebelor91 on October 17, 2005 02:37 AM

Hmmmm.

It also seems like, based on this very very very limited sample of 2 :-), that the library is biased toward picking several faces out of a crowd image, rather than one out of a photo.

I hope that's actually NOT true, and it can be constrained to give me one face.

Cuz I could sure use an automated utility in PHP to do that extreme close-up and crop to 50x50 for the headshots of musicians.
http://uncommonground.com/events.htm

Most of the good thumbnails I did by hand.

PS That site is getting a face-lift soon.

Posted by Richard Lynch on October 21, 2005 12:39 PM