Face recognition Library

Question

I m looking for a free face recognition library for a university project  I m not looking for face detection  I m looking for actual recognition  That means finding images that contain specified faces or libraries that calculate distances between specific faces    I m currently using OpenCV for detecting the faces and a rough Eigenface algorithm for the recognition  But I thought there should be something out there with better performance than a self-written Eigenface algorithm  I m not talking about speed as performance  I m looking for a library with better results than a simple Eigenface approach   I took a look at Faint  but it seems the library is not very reusable for my own applications   I m happy with a library in Python  Java  C    C or something like that  The best thing would be if it can be run on a Windows machine because I m relying on some external Windows-only code at the moment

User · Accepted Answer

Here is a list of commercial vendors that provide off-the-shelf packages for facial recognition which run on Windows:

Cybula - Information on their Facial Recognition SDK. This is a company founded by a University Professor and as such their website looks unprofessional. There's no pricing information or demo that you can download. You'll need to contact them for pricing information.
NeuroTechnology - Information on their Facial Recognition SDK. This company has both up-front pricing information as well as an actual 30 day trial of their SDK.
Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition - (Acquired by Google) Information on their Facial Tracking and Recognition SDK. The demos that they provide help you evaluate their technology but not their SDSK. You'll need to contact them for pricing information.
Sensible Vision - Information on their SDK. Their site allows you to easily get a price quote and you can also order an evaluation kit that will help you evaluate their technology.

User · Answer

We re using OpenCV   It has lots of non-face-recognition stuff in there also  but  rest assured  it does do face-recognition

User · Answer

If your project is on a movie or TV  or anything that has a script  it looks like you definitely want to look at the work of Mark Everingham et al   The software is available  as are the results on a Buffy episode

User · Answer

I would think Eigenface  which you are doing already  is the way to go if you want to calculate the distance between faces  You could try out different approaches like Support Vector Machine or Hidden Markov Model  I found a page that lists major algorithms that could be used for facial recognition  Face Recognition Homepage   Also  when you say  better performance   do you mean speed or accuracy  What kind of problem are you having  How varying are the data  Are they mostly frontal face or do they include profiles

User · Answer

You should look at http   libccv org   It s fairly new  but it provides a free open source high level API for face detection       and  I dare say  is pretty damn amazing   Edit  Worth noting also  that this is one of the few libs that does NOT depend on opencv  and just for kicks  here s a copy of the code for face detection off the documentation page  to give you an idea of whats involved    include  lt ccv h gt  int main int argc  char   argv        ccv dense matrix t  image   0      ccv read argv 1    amp image  CCV IO GRAY   CCV IO ANY FILE       ccv bbf classifier cascade t  cascade   ccv load bbf classifier cascade argv 2            ccv bbf params t params      interval   8   min neighbors   2   accurate   1   flags   0   size   ccv size 24  24         ccv array t  faces   ccv bbf detect objects image   amp cascade  1  params       int i      for  i   0  i  lt  faces- gt rnum  i                  ccv comp t  face    ccv comp t  ccv array get faces  i           printf   d  d  d  d n   face- gt rect x  face- gt rect y  face- gt rect width  face- gt rect y             ccv array free faces       ccv bbf classifier cascade free cascade       ccv matrix free image       return 0

User · Answer

Not really what you re looking for  but it may be useful to you  Face Detection Computer Vision algorithms in MATLAB

User · Answer

pam-face-authentication a PAM Module for Face Authentication  but it would require some work to get what you want  A quick test showed  that the recognition rate are not as good as those of VeriLook from NeuroTechnology   Malic is another open source face recognition software  which uses Gabor Wavelet descriptors  But the last update to the source is 3 years old   From the website   Malic is an opensource face recognition software which uses gabor wavelet  It is realtime face recognition system that based on Malib and CSU Face Identification Evaluation System  csuFaceIdEval  Uses Malib library for realtime image processing and some of csuFaceIdEval for face recognition    Further this could be of interest   gaborboosting   A scientific program applied on Face Recognition with Gabor Wavelet and AdaBoost Algorithm  Feature Extraction Library - FELib refers to  Face Annotation by Transductive Kernel Fisher Discriminant

User · Answer

The next step would be FisherFaces  Try it and check whether they work for you  Here is a nice comparison

User · Answer

You can try open MVG library  It can be used for multiple interfaces too

User · Answer

Update  OpenCV 2 4 2 now comes with the very new cv  FaceRecognizer  Please see the very detailed documentation at    http   docs opencv org 2 4 modules contrib doc facerec index html   Original Post  I have released libfacerec  a modern face recognition library for the OpenCV C   API  BSD license   libfacerec has no additional dependencies and implements the Eigenfaces method  Fisherfaces method and Local Binary Patterns Histograms  Parts of the library are going to be included in OpenCV 2 4   The latest revision of the libfacerec is available at    https   github com bytefish libfacerec   The library was written for OpenCV 2 3 1 with the upcoming OpenCV 2 4 in mind  so I don t support OpenCV versions earlier than 2 3 1  This project comes as a CMake project with a well-documented API  there s also a tutorial on gender classification  You can see a HTML version of the documentation at    http   www bytefish de dev libfacerec    If you want to understand how those algorithms work  you might want to read my Guide To Face Recognition  includes Python and GNU Octave MATLAB examples     http   www bytefish de blog face recognition with opencv2   There s also a Python and GNU Octave MATLAB implementation of the algorithms in my github repository  Both projects in facerec also include several cross validation methods for evaluating algorithms    https   github com bytefish facerec   The relevant publications are    Turk  M   and Pentland  A  Eigenfaces for recognition   Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3  1991   71   86  Belhumeur  P  N   Hespanha  J   and Kriegman  D  Eigenfaces vs  Fisherfaces  Recognition using class specific linear projection   IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 19  7  1997   711   720  Ahonen  T   Hadid  A   and Pietikainen  M  Face Recognition with Local Binary Patterns   Computer Vision - ECCV 2004  2004   469   481

User · Answer

I know it has been a while  but for anyone else interested  there is the Faint project  which has bundled a lot of these features  detection  recognition  etc   into a nice software package

[image-processing] Face recognition Library

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