Small update on face detection post

Just a quick update on my previous post. I hooked my code up to a D-Bus daemon, and used it to detect if I was sitting behind my desk or not.

I had to position the camera a bit lower, because it would sometimes not recognize my face when I was looking at the bottom of my screen. Having a dual-monitor setup doesn’t help either, since you should ideally position the webcam in the middle of the two displays to have good coverage. I positioned the webcam in the middle of the two displays at the bottom and tilted it upwards, which gives good results:

I guesstimated that if the system couldn’t detect a face for a period of 10 seconds, I would be away from my desk (or at least not paying attention to the screen). I played around a bit with pygtk and notify-python to create a status icon and show notification bubbles whenever my status changed. Here’s what happens when it detects that I’m away from my desk (notice the bubble in the upper right corner):

When I return, the system will change its status icon accordingly and notify me again:

OpenCV is fun!

19 Comments

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  1. Nice work Jo.
    Mixing the nofity and opencv is a great idea in HCI

  2. Thanks Vahid!

    The idea is not new though. Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research has done impressive research in this area (be sure to check out the movies at the bottom of the page).

  3. Could you upload your sources, I really want to learn DBUS and py-notify?
    Besides, it looks really nice your software, I would like to have a copy.

  4. When I find some time to do so, I surely will. For learning D-Bus, you can already have a look at the source code for PydgetRFID.

  5. Where can I find the final script (with a status icon)?

  6. This article I so true, keep on writing like this, enjoyment to read 63

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  8. Now isnt that awesome, I have been thinking of the utility and marketability of this and I foresee a great scope. Try thinking of packaging this as a plugin or app..
    The call centres and other professional companies would really want to take this up to track on the time the employees are working on the system.
    Great achievement this is….

  9. Nice post there. Raised a few things I hadn't thought about before. Thx.

  10. Interesting post. I have made a twitter post about this. Others no doubt will like it like I did.

  11. Nice post..

  12. Different point of view from that post. Interesting to say the least.

  13. I really want to learn DBUS and py-notify. Besides, it looks really nice your software, I would like to have a copy.

  14. I really want to learn DBUS and py-notify. Besides, it looks really nice your software, I would like to have a copy.

  15. Interesting facts, I learned new something today…

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