Face Detection and other Vision Processing (and some sample code)

[Nirav Patel]

I've been playing with vision processing stuff for the XO, mostly
using OpenCV.  I have some sample code up at
http://eclecti.cc/code/face-detection-on-the-olpc-xo that does face
detection surprisingly quickly.  It seems that the bottleneck isn't
even the OpenCV Haar Cascade algorithm, but the time it takes to
initialize the v4l2 drivers.

The code I wrote is just basic proof of concept stuff, but there are
some amazing possibilities involved in vision processing, like
recognizing sign language and gestures, drawing in air, playing motion
based games, and even identifying plants and wildlife.

If anyone is interested, I'd like to start developing an Activity that
uses face/object detection for something more fun or useful.  I'm new
to Python and OLPC development, so I could use some help.
Alternately, I am a student, so if anyone is interested in mentoring
this as a possible Summer of Code project, that would be great.