some Facebook face detection and face rec work I did in early 2009

[Shervin]

Hi,

I've already done some work on Face Detection and Face Recognition on
Facebook tagged images. I know that it is a very good target for Face
Detection and Face Rec, which is why I was working on it. We got a
system working fairly well, but our lab split up because our boss had
too many personal problems. But I am still interested in Face
Detection & Face Rec with Facebook, so I thought I would show you guys
some of the stuff we did.

We managed to allow a robot to perform Face Detection and Face
Recognition on its camera feed as well as tagged Facebook images. When
the robot met a new person, it would ask their name while training the
FaceRec system on their face as they were typing. It would also
download all of their tagged Facebook photos, and perform Face
Detection and Face Recognition to train off the detected faces of that
person from Facebook. The Facebook images would typically have such a
high amount of variance that it would make the FaceRec system much
more robust to lighting and positioning conditions.

When performing Face Detection from Facebook tagged images, I used 4 x
OpenCV HaarCascade Face Detectors in parallel, so that it would give
me many frontal and profile faces within a tagged image, and I would
then select the face that is closest to the tagged location, since
most people tag a location that is roughly on the head or body of the
person, but not too far away. It then used a custom EHMM library for
Face Recognition, to train off the detected tag images.

We wrote a (rejected) paper for IROS'09 / Microsoft Research Symposium
here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/ERSymposium2009/facebots-robots_utilizing.pdf

We wrote a (rejected) paper for the RSS'09 robotics conference here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.4836

(If you're wondering why all of our papers were rejected when our work
was very impressive and had huge potential, its because of many
mistakes that our boss made rather than listening to us, and in the
end it resulted in many failures and the splitting up of our lab).

Cheers,
Shervin Emami.