Identifying faces

Identifying faces within an image is useful in many situations. It can potentially classify an image as one containing people or find people in an image for further processing. We will use OpenCV 3.1 (http://opencv.org/opencv-3-1.html) for our examples.

OpenCV (http://opencv.org/) is an open source computer vision library that supports several programming languages, including Java. It supports a number of techniques, including machine learning algorithms, to perform computer vision tasks. The library supports such operations as face detection, tracking camera movements, extracting 3D models, and removing red eye from images. In this section, we will demonstrate face detection.

Using OpenCV to detect faces

The example that follows was adapted from http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/d9/d52/tutorial_java_dev_intro.html. Start by loading the native libraries added to your system when OpenCV was installed. On Windows, this requires that appropriate DLL files are available:

System.loadLibrary...