Face Recognition with Python, in Under 25 Lines of Code

link address: https://realpython.com/blog/python/face-recognition-with-python/
OpenCV is the most popular library for computer vision. Originally written in C/C++, it now provides bindings for Python

OpenCV uses machine learning algorithms to search for faces within a picture. For something as complicated as a face, there isn’t one simple test that will tell you if it found a face or not. Instead, there are thousands of small patterns/features that must be matched. The algorithms break the task of identifying the face into thousands of smaller, bite-sized tasks, each of which is easy to solve. These tasks are also called classifiers.

For something like a face, you might have 6,000 or more classifiers, all of which must match for a face to be detected (within error limits, of course). But therein lies the problem: For face detection, the algorithm starts at the top left of a picture and moves down across small blocks of data, looking at each block, constantly asking, “Is this a face? … Is this a face? … Is this a face?” Since there are 6,000 or more tests per block, you might have millions of calculations to do, which will grind your computer to a halt.

Like a series of waterfalls, the OpenCV cascade breaks the problem of detecting faces into multiple stages. For each block, it does a very rough and quick test. If that passes, it does a slightly more detailed test, and so on. The algorithm may have 30-50 of these stages or cascades, and it will only detect a face if all stages pass. The advantage is that the majority of the pictures will return negative during the first few stages, which means the algorithm won’t waste time testing all 6,000 features on it. Instead of taking hours, face detection can now be done in real time.

Cascade Classification:
First, a classifier (namely a cascade of boosted classifiers working with haar-like features) is trained with a few hundred sample views of a particular object (i.e., a face or a car), called positive examples, that are scaled to the same size (say, 20x20), and negative examples - arbitrary images of the same size.

After a classifier is trained, it can be applied to a region of interest (of the same size as used during the training) in an input image. The classifier outputs a “1” if the region is likely to show the object (i.e., face/car), and “0” otherwise. To search for the object in the whole image one can move the search window across the image and check every location using the classifier. The classifier is designed so that it can be easily “resized” in order to be able to find the objects of interest at different sizes, which is more efficient than resizing the image itself. So, to find an object of an unknown size in the image the scan procedure should be done several times at different scales.

Cascades in practice:
Though the theory may sound complicated, in practice it is quite easy. The cascades themselves are just a bunch of XML files that contain OpenCV data used to detect objects. You initialize your code with the cascade you want, and then it does the work for you.

Since face detection is such a common case, OpenCV comes with a number of built-in cascades for detecting everything from faces to eyes to hands and legs. There are even cascades for non-human things. For example, if you run a banana shop and want to track people stealing bananas, this guy has built one for that!import cv2
import sys

# Get user supplied values
imagePath = sys.argv[1]
cascPath = "haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml"

# Create the haar cascade
faceCascade = cv2.CascadeClassifier(cascPath)

# Read the image
image = cv2.imread(imagePath)
gray = cv2.cvtColor(image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)

# Detect faces in the image
faces = faceCascade.detectMultiScale(
gray,
scaleFactor=1.3,
minNeighbors=2,
minSize=(20, 20)
#flags = cv2.CV_HAAR_SCALE_IMAGE
)

print("Found {0} faces!".format(len(faces)))

# Draw a rectangle around the faces
for (x, y, w, h) in faces:
cv2.rectangle(image, (x, y), (x+w, y+h), (0, 255, 0), 2)

cv2.imshow("Faces found", image)
cv2.waitKey(0)