Face detection in F-Spot

[Etienne Lepercq <e guepe gmail com>]

As many users, I think that a face detection plus a face recognition
feature in F-Spot is a must-have.
There has been several attempts to implement such features (firstly face
detection + region tagging), but none has reached the point of being
integrated in the F-Spot code (yet).

However, recently Ali Servet Donmez stepped up to implement face
detection and region tagging [1].
He made some successful calls from Mono to the openCV demo code [2]. Its
next steps seems to integrate such calls into the mono code, then
implement region tagging inside the F-spot DDB.

Personally, I can't work on such code because of a lack of time, but I
would like to :
1) Raise interest of the f-spot developer/users community, to get
advices, features, architecture requests, etc... (standard open-source
development process)
2) Propose some algorithms ideas/libraries existing for face detection
and/or face recognition.

The actual opencv code (part of the demos of opencv) is not as efficient
as lots of algorithms presented in recent research papers. For example,
[3] proposes a solution based on AdaBoost + color detection which
succesfully detects faces at about 90%, from a standard library of
pictures used in research papers. When looking at the very first
attempts made by Ali Servet Donmez, it seems pretty clear that the
detection rate is far less than 90%.

So, does anyone here knows of some open-source algorithm, based on
opencv or as a library callable from Mono code, able to detect faces, or
even recognize them ? Or some starting point(s) ?

If you have any ideas, or advices for Ali, he always wrote "any advices
welcome" on his blog ;-) and he told me he subscribed to the F-Spot ML.
Thank you.

Etienne Lepercq

[1] : http://www.pittle.org/weblog/f-spot-face-detection-2_433.html
[2] :
http://www.pittle.org/weblog/face-detection-now-works-with-mono_470.html
[3] : Yan-Wen Wu, Xue-Yi Ai (2008), Face detection in color images using
AdaBoost algorithm based on skin color information, Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining, 2008. WKDD 2008. First International Workshop on