Face recognition in photographs: OpenCV and iPhone

Last Wednesday at our March 2009 Central Ohio Linux User's Group meeting (COLUG) the topic was Social Networking on the 'net. That of course led to some discussion about privacy. Inevitably the Google came up because of it's intertwining of it's services. Case in point; Gmail and Picaso. Upload photos to Picaso, and it can start matching faces in photographs with people you know. Are you sending those pictures through Gmail at all? Who's in your contacts in Gmail?

jawildman demonstrated how the facial recognition worked within Google's Picaso. It's amazing technology that seems to work very well.


Hence the reason for this post. After the meeting I stumbled upon OpenCV. OpenCV is "A computer vision library" that focuses mainly on real-time image processing (thanks Wikipedia).


And someone's done the work to link the library to your XCode iPhone projects: Using OpenCV on iPhone. How cool is that? They even took the time to wrap it all up in a nice git-clonable repo with example iPhone Xcode project that'll run in the simulator and "just work". It seems to work quite well.


Now to come up with some iPhone Application ideas that could use this and sell well in the AppStore. ;)
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Can books be cursed?

A while back I was reading "When Ghosts Speak". If you've viewed the front page of this blog, it shows that I'm 'reading it'. Well, I was. I finished it. I didn't update the blog. Yes, I need to. I will. soon.

But that's not the point of this post. I was reading that book and "Ghosts amoung us". I didn't feel anything odd while I was reading them, but my wife did!

She just brought this up the other day by saying something towards "Those books gave me kreeps". I was surprised, and noted that I didn't recall her saying anything about it when I had the books here from the library (for a total of about a month). She says that she mentioned it a number of times. I don't recall this.

But what she did say is that she felt like someone was here with us while I was reading the books, and left when the books left.

What's weird is that I've always considered myself more psychic then her, if I am psychic. I get vibes from people. I believe I've seen spirits a few times.

But I didn't get a feeling off the books at all. In fact, I quite enjoyed reading the books and thought I got a lot out of both of them.

My mom's since given us a few quince seeds, which I need to put above the doors. My wife took one and put it in her purse, but I don't think the quince seeds are intended for that use. Anyone know?
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