[jwcrawley] is busy planning for the Makevention coming up in Bloomington, Indiana in late August. One problem when working any con is manning the door; it’s a good idea to know how many people are there, and you can’t double count people. Previously, the volunteers used dead trees to estimate how many people have turned up. This year they might go with a more technological solution: face recognition and tracking.
The project is called uWho, and it uses the faceRecognizer class in OpenCV. The purpose of the entire project is to identify who someone is from previous frames. If your face is unknown to the program, your likeness – rather, a few points of data – are added to the database of faces. It’s simple, and according to [jwcrawley], it works.
While this is technically the best way to count how many unique people show up to Makevention, there will be some discussions to see if this solution is appropriate. The program only saves unique data from a face locally, and does nothing online. It’s less evil than whatever Facebook does, but there are obvious privacy implications here.
