
OpenBR – An open face recognition/biometry library - afics
http://openbiometrics.org/
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pavlov
I really like the explanatory graphic on OpenBR's front page. It's certainly
not very artistic... But it does a great job of explaining at a single glance
what exactly this project does and where it fits in a software pipeline. I
wish more projects had an upfront compact visual representation of what they
offer.

I can imagine what it would look like if this were a .io startup instead of a
research project. The front page would be 20 times taller with endless
scrolling, yet consist mostly of beautifully laid out white space filled with
some trendy shade of brown. In that vast emptiness there would be floating
decapitated heads that actively try to escape the mouse cursor. When I finally
manage to hover over one of the heads, it would reveal a nondescript slogan,
for example _" Recognize. Integrate. Socially."_ There would be a single
cryptic two-line code example given in CoffeeScript, and nowhere on the site
would it be apparent whether this product is commercial and how much it costs.

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simgidacav
Guys, help me. Every time I see something like this I think "cool thing!", but
I also start thinkin about new ways someone will start to track me down.

Seriously, my paranoid level has never been so high.

~~~
Deestan
Paranoia can be a symptom of growing or oncoming depression. You should take
that seriously: _At least_ take a few days off and try to get a feel for your
current mental state.

~~~
stewbrew
Studies have shown that depressed people sometimes have a more adequate world
view.

~~~
samweinberg
Yep, that's called depressive realism. It's pretty bizarre to think about.

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ismaelc
You can find OpenBR, along with 40+ other face recognition APIs, libraries,
SDKs, and software at [http://blog.mashape.com/post/53379410412/list-
of-40-face-det...](http://blog.mashape.com/post/53379410412/list-of-40-face-
detection-recognition-apis)

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contingencies
This is less 'US defence establishment releases software library' than 'US
defence establishment requests decentralisation/functional political
deniability of widespread facial recognition, offloading of hardware costs to
consumer'.

~~~
northwest
Although I currently can't see any evidence of involvement of any government
branch, the ultimate result may be the same nevertheless.

Google Glass certainly has the same issue, but to an even higher degree, since
we _know_ about the collaboration of Google with the NSA.

EDIT: thanks for the correction, missed that one.

~~~
bosie
There you go:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6159326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6159326)

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neya
Can someone differentiate between OpenCV and openBR? I think I've read about
people using OpenCV for facial recognition. How do these both differ?

Thanks!

~~~
jklontz
The OpenBR API is designed to cater to the researchers and users of biometric
algorithms, where as the OpenCV API is designed to solve a more general scope
of image processing problems.

OpenCV includes implementations of several seminal face recognition algorithms
(PCA, LDA, & LBP). The OpenBR algorithm is more modern/sophisticated in its
combination of several well studied approaches. While I haven't explicitly
compared OpenCV against OpenBR, the OpenCV algorithms can and have been
expressed within the OpenBR and are known to be less accurate. Having said
that, accuracy & algorithm choice are highly dependent on image quality. Our
technical paper [1] provides more details.

[1]
[http://openbiometrics.org/publications/klontz2013open.pdf](http://openbiometrics.org/publications/klontz2013open.pdf)

~~~
neya
Thank you, that was very informative :)

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nl
_In the unlikely event that you were given a USB License Dongle, then dongle
must be in the computer in order to use the SDK. No configuration of the
dongle is needed._

[http://openbiometrics.org/doxygen/latest/installation.html](http://openbiometrics.org/doxygen/latest/installation.html)

Anyone read enough to know when that occurs?

~~~
jklontz
Hi! I'm the primary developer of this project. This paragraph of the
documentation is out of date. There is never a need for a dongle, it's all
FOSS :)

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polskibus
This is great news! Looking forward to experimenting with this new library. I
hope it can be somehow used on Android in the future.

~~~
jklontz
Please feel free to ask questions on our mailing list [1] or IRC channel [2].
Our software dependencies are Qt & OpenCV, both of which compile for Andriod,
so OpenBR should be able to run there also, but no one has tried yet.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/openbr-
de...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/openbr-dev)

[2] irc.freenode.net #openbr

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mtrimpe
I'm curious about how to interpret their 'Face Recognition Evaluation' data
though.

I'd like to use this for authentication purposes but if I'm interpreting it
right their performance is close to existing solutions, but not close enough
for commercial use.

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jklontz
Correct, we do a decent job on mugshots/driver's licenses, but are not at
commercial level performance yet. Keep an eye out for NIST FRVT 2012 [1] and
our upcoming conference paper [2] if you'd like to see more complete
comparisons.

[1]
[http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/frvt-2012.cfm](http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/frvt-2012.cfm)

[2]
[http://openbiometrics.org/publications/klontz2013open.pdf](http://openbiometrics.org/publications/klontz2013open.pdf)

~~~
mtrimpe
Nice work! By the way, now that you're here ;) do you perhaps also know if
there's a way to address fjcaetano's concerns if you have access to a full
video feed?

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jklontz
"Liveness detection" is an active area of research within the community. I
know you can enable this check on Android and it works moderately well.

~~~
mtrimpe
Awesome. Thanks for the reference!

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ericb
Anyone know of a library that can track the direction a user is looking? I
don't need exact eye-tracking type stuff from special equipment, just left
right up down etc. My initial googles have come up short so far.

