Face Detection / Recognition and OpenCV Tutorial

Given still or video images of a scene, face recognition is a technique to identify or verify one or more persons in the scene using a stored database of faces.

"Face Recognition" generally involves two stages:

1. Face Detection, where a photo is searched to find any face (shown here as a green rectangle), then image processing cleans up the facial image for easier recognition.
2. Face Recognition, where that detected and processed face is compared to a database of known faces, to decide who that person is (shown here as red text)

There are two directly related websites to provide actively updated information:

1. The Face Recognition Homepage to provide relevant information in the area of face recognition;
2. The Face Detection Homepage to to gather all useful information about finding faces;

OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming functions for real time computer vision. It includes very good implementation for face detection and face recognition.

1. Face Detection using OpenCV; Implemented in facedetect.c;

2. Face Recognition using OpenCV with Eigenfaces or Principal Component Analysis method (PCA);

The following tutorials show how to use OpenCV for face detection and recognition:

1. "Introduction to Face Detection and Face Recognition" by Shervin Emami;
2. "OpenCV haartraining (Rapid Object Detection With A Cascade of Boosted Classifiers Based on Haar-like Features)" by Naotoshi Seo;