Computer Vision and Face Recognition in C and C++

Living in the UK which I believe is home to the most CCTV cameras per head of population (about 1 for every 16 people in the UK) means I'm not terribly keen on advancing this type of technology but you can't really halt progress, just try to control it so it doesn't get abused. We must be close the point of having software that can track a person in a crowd moving across a city, if it hasn't already been done.

Face recognition is a hard problem to solve from scratch but it's now a mature enough technology that even cheap compact digital cameras can identify faces. Open Source is making inroads into this as well with two libraries. The LibFace open source library uses the OpenCV library for face recognition and has got a complete collection of functions that are essential for building a face recognition system.

Intel originally produced the OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) library, written mostly in C which is about computer vision and has over 400 different functions covering 28 areas of computer vision research, of which one aspect is face recognition. There's even an O'Reilly book about using OpenCV and writing applications in C, C++ and Python. There's also a good guide to getting started with OpenCV from Leeds University. Intel sells a library IPP which is integrated with OpenCV so that if you have IPP, some functions are much faster.

• Link to C Code Library