In this post I will show you how to use the still image FaceDetector class from the Android SDK to achieve (mostly) real-time face detection.  The following method was used in the creation of the MonkeyCam application.

Since its first release, the Android SDK has made available the FaceDetector class, which “identifies the faces of people in a Bitmap graphic object”.  By using the FaceDetector on preview frames from the camera, we approximate the real-time face detection.  For example in the MonkeyCam application we achieved a rate of slightly over one second per frame which is in the same range as other solutions found around the Internet using more complex solutions like third party computer vision libraries.  Short of using the NDK to do GPU programming for the face detection algorithm this was a very usable compromise.

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Labels: Android, Face detection, FaceDetector, Mobile App, Mobile Application, Mobile Development, MonkeyCam, Smartphones

The latest Macadamian Barcamp session focused on Apple's iPhone SDK. We found that the iPhone SDK shined by the quality of the tools it bundled. Instruments, the included profiler was rather impressive. This seems to be one of the framework's strong points. Templates to start building applications out of the box are also provided in Xcode.

We agreed that since the iPhone framework requires the use of Objective-C, it will have a fairly extensive learning curve for any person not used to native OSX development. In comparison, Google's Android is based on technologies we are more familiar with, but still has some rough edges. It will be nice to see how the two SDKs stack up, once the Android platform becomes more mature.

Below's a Barcamp style comparison chart of the smartphone SDKs we looked at:

Labels: Android, Barcamp, iPhone, Smartphones