Art, design, and Raspberry Pi: A face tracking painting #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Check out this great project from Pierre posted on Think RPI.

This painting was exhibited in Berlin during Pictoplasma 2014 Festival.

Eyes are following visitors (if many, change randomly).

It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi, C++ Code and Open CV (using Face Recognition)

Technical Stuff – Face Recognition

Software is based on Raspberry Pi and strongly inspired from my previous “OpenCV and Pi camera” posts.

For face recognition, software is very easy : it only detects faces, without recognizing people. It’s fast.

face_cascade.detectMultiScale(imageMat, faces, 1.1,3,CV_HAAR_SCALE_IMAGE,Size(80,80));
g_nVisitors = faces.size(); // number of visitors found

Once faces are detected, instructions are sent to servos to move eyes. Actually, it looks like a physical version of XEyes, for old good X11 geeks 😉
The code implements a lot of funny behaviors :

  • if unique visitor, follow him
  • if many visitors, randomly change
  • if a new visitor appears, focus on him
  • if nobody, search visitors with funny eyes moves sometimes, take a nap, close eyelids.

The tricky part was how to remember which visitor is where, frame after frame. And, when the face is lost while few seconds, be able to remember this visitor was already here (it’s not a new one, no need to focus on him/her).

Technical Stuff – Servo Control

Eyes are controlled by 2 servos (horizontal and vertical moves). Eyelid is controlled by a third servo. Thanks to ServoBlaster, control servos with Raspberry Pi is really very easy.

Read more about the project here.

Smallpainting jpg 320×320 pixels


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