Installing Open Biometric Recognition

Installing OpenBR

Introduction

The Open Source Biometric Recognition is advanced framework that can act as a add-on on OpenCV, it doesn't work with SimpleCV. Also if you are interrested in more Robot Visioning program's keep reading!

Installation

Because GCC 4.7.3 is required, Ubuntu 13.04 is advised. See here for the official installation instructions. There are few reminders when following the instructions, there is a fair amount of data to be downloaded...and just remember that places where it says:
make -j 4
Means you use 4 cores, perhaps you have more or less (like my test machine is virtual and uses only 2). Also you will need a lot of disk space and it will consume a lot of bandwidth for downloading data-sets.

running in to the error message: libpng error: Incompatible libpng version in application and library
This is fairly know problem with self compiled program's. But nothing serious.
Just get the correct libpng and compile it [./configure, make, sudo make install ].

The OpenBR SDK.

If you run in to segmentation error/faults the most conclusive I could find is this. What shows that getting it to run correctly is not that easy...I did it 3 times, same Ubuntu and GCC, OpenCV 2.4.5 and 2.4.8 And there is nothing clear yet if 2.4.8 is not supported, I will update this article as soon the cause is more clear.

Other Projects

But meanwhile getting OpenBR to work and finding useful pages I came across a few more interresting programs that I do not want write a complete article about but did find useful to mention here! Here is a list of similar and handy project. I will expend this part when I have more information of the software.

Object Recognition Kitchen

The O.R.K. is based on Ecto what is a C++/Python framework. Highly ROS supported, but like ROS, very dependable.

Eulerian Magnification

Eulerian Magnification is a method to applies spatial decomposition, take a look at the website, the only hard part is getting correct images to use. But give it a try!

Gamera

Gamera besides being some fictive monster it is also a toolkit for a document recognition system. What can be useful when you want your system to read document's, with special symbols.

ccv

CVV is a gesture recognition. Something that was to my personal robot needs.

PyVision

PyVision is a object-oriented Computer Vision Toolk. I did not test it because it is Windows and Mac only! But if anyone has something? 

RoboVision

RoboVision is a software stack, besides that I found some useful information and links for stereo visioning. Plus on the blog there are some CUDA examples, but I did not try those yet.

Qualia-Smile

Qualia is a little python script, that with the use of OpenCV can detect smiles. I did not benchmark it with a list of different faces, feel free to do so.

ofxIpVideoGrabber

ofxlpVideoGrabber is not so useful recognition but to make overlay's.

MFTracker

MFtracker is based on the TLD, and uses Python. Very simple but indeed some potential! Do not confuse people with MFtracker for the financial sector...which I did not look at.

Others...

Besides there are some project like face authentication for desktop applications, but these I did not use. Perhaps somebody else can use them...