

Ask HN: Does Hair recognition exist? - arturmakly

im doing an automated art experiment. My goal is to draw 1 set of vector points around the face and a 2nd set around just the hair. Is there anything out there that an do this with a 95% accuracy?
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trcollinson
Obligatory XKCD [1]

With quite a bit of work, a research team, a development team, and quite a few
servers I was able to finish a project which did face recognition at just
about the accuracy you are talking about [2]. With that we increased the
accuracy of the hair and scalp recognition within the OpenCV project. However,
this required quite a bit of algorithmic training [3]. Also, this did not
include a set of vector points drawn around the subject, just a bounding box.
This is a rather difficult problem set.

Now, if you have seen these fun little apps which show you what your hair
would look like with a new style (or what you would look like with a set of
glasses, or a new dress), this uses very little actual recognition. Basically
they take a picture of you within a general "person shaped bounding box" or
for hair a "head shaped bounding box" and then overlay the new style on top of
the area where your hair, glasses, or clothes should be. This is relatively
simple (especially in comparison to actual recognition). Might it solve some
of your problem?

[1] [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

[2] This accuracy was for the entire algorithmic set. It did not include a
single datapoint set like "hair". It was also highly dependent on the image
quality and how the subject was positioned within the image.

[3] Our test image set was 50,000. Our production training image set was
1,500,000 images.

