Face recognition on a PiZero WiFi with serial out

[Mark Johnston]

Got some python3 facial recognition going on one of my (many) Pi Zero Wifi boards.

I hope to feed this into my Ros2  Droidbot so as it moves around it will react to whoever it sees.   With 7 possible faces (with very long startup time of over a minute) it reports any face it sees every 4 seconds which is 'workable' but no Nvidia level of performance.

To recognize one face every 4 seconds loads the Pi zero 83-98% all the time depending on what phase it is in at the time.   So this is very worthwhile to take off the Pi4 load budget although the Pi4 would be faster it still would be a big load. It uniquely identifies which face it is really well but it is exact same fixed image situation, not a real  AI learning scheme.  Good enough for what I want right now.

I started here as it has great install instructions but more importanly a fully working image that saves a LOAD of time!  

https://robotzero.one/face-recognition-party-greeter-raspberry-pi

There are loads of pages on different methods but beside the nice pi zero image above I also found this page to be very good sort of 'manual' on stuff to try:

https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition

I did have to do minimal hack to the python script to then get it to output serial but that was childs play relative to getting the full facial recognition stack in an hour or two.

Mark