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. ;)