Building a face-tracking robot with Python in an afternoon | Hacker News Reader

Building a face-tracking robot with Python in an afternoon

blog.aicookbook.com

43 pointsjnoller10 comments

Terrific stuff, you can do a lot with OpenCV right out of the box. The Python bindings are pretty poorly documented, though (they change a lot). As much as I'd rather write Python than C++, if you're not already familiar with OpenCV it can be a lot easier to learn with the C++ version. There's a great introduction and API rooted here: http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/cpp/index.html

Shameless self-promotion: If you're interested in face / eye tracking, email me or keep tabs on http://www.gazehawk.com.

That is seriously awesome. Reminds me of the cool stuff that used to be on hackaday

Reading how people come up with great stuff in matter of hours always makes me feel miserable.

Oh yeah? Well what about this then :

Picasso Painting Sells for $106 Million-Painted in One Day

http://www.imaginelifestyles.com/luxuryliving/2010/05/picass...

Just try to keep in mind that when someone says "I built X in just Y hours" they tend to omit the "and have spent Z years developing the skill set required to do that."

Headroid's author here - yes, the background skills took a fair while to acquire. As a kid (I'm 34 now) my late father (hardcore electrical engineer) used to bring home electronics junk so I could build robots aged 10 (solder+Commodore 64 joystick port+Lego+Basic). Then I got bored of robotics for a long time. For 11 yrs I've worked as an A.I. consultant after an AI degree/MSc, recently I wanted to hack, play and build fun stuff so I setup the AICookbook.com with Google Group and I'm posting my play-time projects. Headroid is one of them, there's also OCR (see the Plaque entry on the blog), NLP, recommendation engines, data mining, game play (auto Zork solver anyone?) and more to be done. I'm also a part of Brighton's HackerSpace (BuildBrighton.com) which is where I met BotBuilder who built the servo board and frame. All are welcome to come join the fun :-)

This link was valuable just for the introduction to OpenCV.

Yes, but is it racist?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM

Computers are born color blind. They have to be taught to discriminate

You should watch the video he links rather then assuming something. HP developed some video drivers for face tracking that didn't handle the "edge-case" of a person with black/dark skin.

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