Today, I was trying out some new stuff with face recognition. I just feel like I need to record this down or I’ll forget how I did it. So, I set up this camera, you know, just a regular webcam, nothing fancy. The goal was to make it lock onto my face and keep staring at me no matter where I moved in the room. Sounds creepy, but it’s pretty cool, trust me.
Setting Up
First, I grabbed a few tools. I needed this library called OpenCV, which is basically the go-to for anything related to computer vision. I also used something called “dlib” for the face detection part. It’s got this neat feature that can pinpoint facial landmarks, like where your eyes and nose are. Installation was a breeze, just a couple of commands in the terminal, and I was good to go.
- OpenCV: Used for image processing.
- dlib: Used for face detection and landmark prediction.
Coding the Thing
Next up, writing the code. I started with a simple script to capture video from the webcam. Then, I used dlib to detect my face in each frame. Once the face was detected, I drew a bounding box around it, just to make sure it was working right. This is the most basic part. The camera just needs to find my face and that is already done. But that’s not enough, right? I need to make it track my face.
The tricky part was keeping the focus on the face. I had to calculate the center of the bounding box and then adjust the camera’s view to keep that center point, well, centered. It involved a bit of math to figure out how much to move the camera based on where my face was in the frame. I mean, not really hard math, but you know, just a little bit of calculation stuff.
Making It Move
To make the camera actually move, I hooked it up to a couple of servo motors. These are the little guys that can rotate to specific angles. I wrote some more code to control these motors based on the position of my face. If I moved to the left, the camera would turn left. If I moved up, it would tilt up. Pretty straightforward stuff.
The Result
After a few hours of tweaking and testing, it finally worked. The camera was smoothly following my face around the room. It felt a bit weird at first, having this thing constantly staring at me, but it was also super satisfying. I even added a feature where it would zoom in a little when I moved closer and zoom out when I moved away. That is the final result of this whole experiment.
It was a fun little project and I learned a lot about combining face detection with some basic robotics. Plus, it’s a neat party trick, though some of my friends think it’s a bit too much. They just don’t get it, you know? Anyway, that’s all. Just wanted to share this before I forgot all about it.
