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During one of my projects, I came across Microsoft's face recognition API (Azure Face API) and it looked good enough to recognize people's faces and detect if a person is a newcomer or a repeating customer to our store. As our installations mainly use the game engine Unity, I wanted to be able to use the Face API from Unity. Face API does not have an SDK for Unity but their requests are just HTTP requests so the Networking classes in Unity can be wrapped into methods to make it easy to call these APIs. First of all, to those who just want to see the code, here it is . My tests focus on the identification of a face in an input image. The full tutorial I followed can be found here . The Main scene goes through the steps in the tutorial such as creating a PersonGroup and adding Persons to the group if it is not created yet. Just make sure you: Change the API key. I used a free trial key which is no longer valid. Use whatever images you want. I don't mind you us...

This article is based on the great tutorial here on how to train and detect custom objects with Tensorflow. I also referred to the official documentations here and  here  for running Tensorflow model building locally. It was my first custom detection project and I faced some hiccups along the way and this article is to log and share my finding so it can help other beginners like me. In the end, I managed to train a tensorflow model to detect Batsumaru , a character from Sanrio. This is how the detection will look like. The tools Windows 10 Pro 64 Tensorflow originally 1.7.1 and upgraded to 1.12.0. I will share the reason later. Python 3.5.4 LabelImg for image labeling PyCharm IDE Steps and Pitfalls Some of the mistakes I made and other discoveries when following the guide. I will not repeat the steps mentioned in the original guide, but only the parts where I had to deviate from the walkthrough and found out things by myself. The training and...

It's been a while since my last entry and since it is a new start in 2019, I thought I'd write something about "gone with the old and in with the new". I've had my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (pnotewifi) since 2014, and it's one of the early Galaxy Note tablet series. It has served me well all this years but now it just sits there collecting dust. My old Samsung GT-N8013 I've known a long time about custom Android ROMs like CyanogenMod but has never had the motivation to try them out, until now ! Overview of the process For beginners like me, I didn't have an understanding of the installation process and so it looked complicated and it was one of the reasons I was put off in trying the custom ROM. I just want to say, it's not complicated at all!   Basically you will need to Prepare an SD card and install Android SDK (you need adb ). Install a custom boot loader ( TWRP is the de facto tool at the moment). Use adb to copy custom...

Based on a previous post , I decided to write a plugin for the Intel Realsense SDK methods so we can use these methods from within Unity. FYI Intel also has their own Unity wrapper in their Github repository , but for our projects, I needed to perform image processing with OpenCV and passing the results to Unity instead of just the raw image/depth data. There is a plugin called OpenCVForUnity to use OpenCV functions from Unity but previous experiments indicate the image processing inside Unity can take a long time. I hope this post can help someone else who wants to use Intel's cameras or any other devices natively in Unity. Test Environment Windows 10 64bit Unity 2017.2.0f3 x64 bit Realsense SDK from Intel CMake 3.0 or higher Steps Checkout the native plugin code here . Don't worry about the other projects in the same repository. The relevant code is in the link above. Checkout the Unity sample project here . However, instead of master you need to go to the br...

During one of the projects in my company I needed to build a native plugin to let Unity communicate with the Asus Xtion2, specifically to get its depth data. We used to be able to do this pretty easily with the Kinect but since Microsoft discontinued it, we need to start looking for alternatives. Test Environment Windows 10 64 bit. Unity 2017.2.0f3 x64. Important! Choose x64 or x86 to match your Unity installation. OpenNI For Xtion2 SDK. The official SDK is somewhat different from the OpenNI SDK provided by Asus but it should behave the same. The one provided by Asus can be downloaded here . Make sure you choose the latest one. CMake 3.0 or higher Who is it for Someone who has been using Unity for some time and is comfortable with the concept of classes and objects. It will be very helpful if you know C++ and pointers too. Steps Since the code is provided, I will only go over the major steps. Let me know in the comments if I miss anything. Build and install OpenNI...

Recently I needed to extract a hand drawn object, like a child's doodle, from a camera image. The method that I found to be working reasonably good was OpenCV's EM (Expectation Maximisation) method. The idea is that there will be pixels that are "close" enough that they are classified as one group, and hopefully with a doodle on paper, the algorithm will be able to cluster the colored pixels together against the white background of the paper. First, I tried the algorithm on a random image and classifies it into three clusters. The result is as follows. Hmm...looks good. The bright areas, almost white, are classified into one cluster (blue), whereas the darker and lighter colors are classified into two other clusters (red and green). So what happens when used on a hand drawn doodle, and clustering it to two clusters (two separate background and desired object) ? Not bad at all. There are some "holes" inside the contour since the coloring does n...

I have been recently working on projects that use the Microsoft Kinect, and also had the chance to use OpenCV to calibrate the color camera in the Kinect. This is because one of the projects use Aruco AR markers and to obtain the orientation of the Aruco markers, we need the camera's internal parameters and therefore, calibration! The Kinect's camera is just like any other webcam, so there is nothing special about it. But I thought the calibration process can help others who are just starting to use OpenCV and need to get camera internal parameters. The code can be found here . You need to prepare a calibration board with checker patterns with known length. The pattern image is also included in the repository but you'll need to find a sturdy planar object such as a wooden board. Currently there is not any UI so it's probably good to share here that after you position your checker board you need to manually press 'c' to capture an image. Repeat this 10 ti...