Week 6/7

Design



Since my previous post there have been no current changes to the design of the main system. There has been one main change and that is instead of using openGL libraries such as Glut or FreeGlut, me and my associate student have concluded that it would be better to keep it as a directX program since our platform for this thesis  will just be Windows.

Coding

The main part of these 2 weeks has been coding.

The first part was coding the kinect interface properly to receive data from the kinect. However this proved more challenging than originally expected and with the help of William and Hamed (a PhD Student/Researcher at the university), i have more understanding on how it works.

The second part of the coding is for the face detector. This is where my research of these 2 weeks comes in (written below).

The coding for this thesis has been more challenging than originally expected.

Research

During these past 2 weeks my main bulk of research was to look into the face detectors. Since there are more than one algorithms that could be used i narrowed them down to 2 main ones:

1. HAAR Object Detection - this is a library in OpenCV that has a face detection algorithm built into it
2. AAM Tracking - This is an external library that has been built to integrate into OpenCV.

My research into this has shown me that AAM tracking is more refined and is able to detect the face with a better accuracy than HAAR. I have not completed all my research into this, and when i have a blog post will be done on just this.


Current Implementation

Currently im in the process of implementing the HAAR detection because it comes ready with OpenCV. If my research shows me that AAM is a better algorithm in all aspects, steps will be taken to integrate AAM Tracking.