Here we’ll look at building Headroid1 in a few hours – a face tracking 2-axis robot head controlled by Python and open source modules. UPDATE see Headroid featured in The Gadget Show in the 3 minute video made at MakerFaire UK 2011. This is what the finished system will look like: An earlier demo was …
When I first played with openCV I had no idea how good the facial detection would be, or how fast it might run on my MacBook. I’m recording this demo so you’ll know what to expect… pyOpenCV is the Python binding to the open source openCV (originally created by Intel for vision research). It comes …
This is a quick progress report on my webservice for optical character recognition using the open source Tesseract engine. This builds on my post a month back ‘Tesseract OCR to read plaques‘. The immediate goal is to let the OpenPlaques folk have an automatic service which machine-reads English Heritage Plaques (blue plaques – very common …
Here is a rather neat demo of the advantage of tracking a face whilst performing speech recognition – if the user is looking at the computer then the computer knows to listen. This is common sense to a human but for a computer with just a microphone input it has to listen to everything, not …
Back at Christmas I was speaking to John Graves about his Open Allure DS PhD project – a conversational interface written in Python. The project has moved wonderfully forward over the past few months, I’ll summarise some of the features of Open Allure here. Sidenote – if you prefer podcasts then John was recently interviewed …
Here’s the new logo for the wiki: This uses the OCR A font, designed in 1968 to allow both machines and humans to read text (available by free download). An OCR B was released in Europe at the same time which is easier for humans to read but I didn’t think it was as pretty …
I had a tricky time installing openCV 2.1 on my 10.5 Mac (Leopard) recently, the build instructions aren’t brilliant in the wiki. Here are my notes. I used the Mac notes as a guide and followed the new-style CMake system to build from scratch. I made sure during ‘cmake -G’ that new-style Python support was …