Let’s face it, sorting out how to achieve face recognition sounds daunting – but it is surprising just how much is relatively plug and play these days.
For example, a friend at Cambridge MakeSpace told me about a motion sensor that has some elementary face recognition built into the chip itself, so that when you wire up the sensor to the right GPIO pins on your Raspberry Pi, you can in theory read off a set of numbers that tell you if there is a face in the frame, what size it is, and what degree of confidence it has that it is indeed a face and not an odd pattern on the carpet. It can even tell the difference between a head facing forwards and a head pointing away.
This sounded perfect for me – for Catatonic I wanted to be able to tell when someone was moving away from the installation so that I could lure them back with more cat pics.
Unfortunately the sensor was out of stock almost everywhere, and reading the reviews it seemed to have reliability issues. But I did manage to track one down and install it – and it worked! I was almost impressed; however, it only worked over a range of about a metre or two, and the reliability was about 80%. So my punters would have to be pretty close to trigger a response, and there would be a fairly high chance that I wouldn’t notice when they moved away.
