Engineering Projects/Attendance/Howard Community College/fall2012/p1-503-bcs

Problem Statement
We want to find an easy way of taking attendance autonomously using facial recognition software.

Team Members
Cale Broemmelsiek Shin

Summary
We initially struggled to implement the open source facial recognizer from OpenCV. However, we got a program called Visual Control to begin working and recognizing faces. Also, we explored Picasa's face recognizing software and organized pictures of our classmates by their names.

Story
9/18/12

We accessed the previous group's work and decided to set up tasks using their strategy first. This included using a Python coding program that was inputted into Picasa. We tried other open source programs, like OpenCV as another option for facial recognition. We are comparing the differences between the two programs.

9/20/12

We decided to narrow in on social network programs as an intuitive way of taking attendance, as the software is built in and already sorts things into folders. We are also exploring the ideas of more specific avenues of recognitoin like with OpenCV and video calibration programs.

9/27/12

We have started downloading Python and C++ command lines form http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/FaceRecognition, ran into trouble implementing the input and output files, but software is customizable if we can master it.

We have started to manipulate Picasa with varying results. We are trying to get Picasa to automatically recognize faces after a limited number of inputs and place them into folders that are private.

We have made a Facebook group page for this class called "Facial Recognition." This group can store photographs that tag people's names automatically. More importantly, this group is a secret group, so the only way someone can access these photos is if they are invited to the group, protecting our class's privacy.

10/2/12

We got an open source code to run and actively recognize faces. It is called Visual Control and can be found under the software list. The program requires the user to be fairly close to the webcamera, so we are exploring ways to use an external webcam that can be positioned next to the door of the classroom. The program only needs about three pictures to begin recognizing the person in the picture and stores the pictures into a single folder. The folder has to have already formatted pictures, meaning we need to find a way to format the pictures in a separate program so that we can just input the images into the program's trainer. We are now exploring how to take this data and convert it to a representation of attendance.

10/9/12

we used the visual control code and began to look for ways to import pictures from an outside source in order to recognize faces and also to use as gray scaled images to use them as the original to compare new pictures with and to get the software to periodically take pictures when motion was sensed.

Material List
Webcam (borrowed)

Laptop (borrowed)

Software List
Picasa

Facebook

OpenCV Face Recognition

Visual Control

Dev C++

Time
37 hours 52 minutes

Tutorials






Next Steps
1. Download the visual control software, the one listed on the bottom is fully working and the link on the top allows you to view the code and edit it. We now just need to integrate a capture device so it automatically take pictures and create an output interface so its just a list of students.

2. Find a program that can analyze filenames and sort the results in Visual Control or Picasa. These should be able to be sent to a spreadsheet like Excel, so they can be represented in some way.