Rob’s geeky discoveries Blog

I got a mutiple face detection in Flash application running smoothly which is rather nice Thanks a million to Squidder and to the original author of the OpenCV file @ Intel, Rainer Lienhart. The deploy has  a zipped up XML document with Haar Classifier pattern recognition…

The AS3 unzips this data, grabs the blob/face detection data, polls frames from the camera and scans them for faces. When it finds them it will draw a rectangle around the detected faces and render them back on top of the video feed.

Check it out at http://bit.ly/HYkJF

A quick nose at the OpenCV Wikipedia stub will show you just how interesting this technology is as it’s used for:

• Ego-motion
• Face Recognition
• Gesture Recognition

FDT made knocking this together and sharing it on SVN in house at Glue a breeze. Hopefully I’ll knock something up with this and share some source other than what Squidder has already kindly posted.

Cheerio

There have been no posts from me for a while as I’ve been building the AS3 carousel section (eBay items) and a series of DoubleClick Ads utilising Twitter feeds in banners and Ebay listings in banners too.  The ads are in AS2 as the DoubleCick TABS system can’t yet take AS3 FYI (coming soon, Cheers Haden for the inside info!). This is all for The Sun Help for Heroes campaign where Ebayers can apply to become sellers and then donate their profits of the items they sell directly to the campaign. We’ve got loads of Celebrities to donate items too and there is a branded hub site pulling all this activity together live within eBay at:

•  http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=the_sun_newspaper

In my rummagings on Cross Domain I discovered this good hack for accessing the pixels from Video on distributed CDN’s:

• http://jessewarden.com/2009/03/handling-crossdomainxml-and-302-redirects-using-netstream.html

More posts soon hopefully although my day to day link posting is all being done via Twitter these days so follow along if you’re interested in these things. I am endeavouring to keep my microblogging professional rather than letting you know I am ‘on the bus’/'popped to the shop’ etc so Flash goodies are promised 

The latest site I’ve been working on has been live in Germany for a week or so now and is running nicely so thought I’d do a quick post in case anyone reading is interested in what I’ve been building lately…

If you can read Deutsch – the live site is http://www.blivebeatology.de – the version I’m linking is a showcase version in English so you’ll have a clue what’s going on. The basic premise of this site is that you upload a picture of your face and get back a video of yourself beatboxing but there’s a hoard of other functionality to explore and a big social element including a Facebook App so you can post your generated videos and share amongst your friends. The amazing video assets are all custom shot by Superglue and we’re very proud of it all. A holiday is in order for me but I shall probably do a bit more of a write up on it at a later date.

So… if you want to try it out or see an example grab a passport style photo of you – higher res and higher contrast the better ( sub 500KB) or if you don’t have one to hand, save this one below to your desktop. You’ll need a decent video player like VLC to watch .FLV directly but our system also generates an AVI. I’ve linked the image below to the generated AVI for this image and you can watch the FLV for it here if you prefer.

The back end will map the image onto one of 4 3D meshes, analysing it and applying one of several matrices to get the best fit and generate the videos on the back end which then send it back to you in Flash. We’re also creating 3GP videos for mobiles which are downloaded via a QR code link and allowing Webcam upload as a photo submission method so have been very busy.

Enjoy the beatboxery

This post originally just said “http://www.mogulus.com/gluelondon Xmas party broadcast, hooray! ”

Just thought I’d clarify, we broadcast the DJ sets from the Glue in-office Christmas party (Using Adobe Media Encoder to kick out multiple bit rate steams and maintain the stabiliity). Stuart kindly converted this to MPEG 4 so I might post, contact me if you want it (Audio quality isn’t great to be honest. Suffice to say on the night it was most excellent) Big up DJ Jens also for a storming back to back techno and old school garage set. Merry Christmas indeed!

This and the HBO Voyeur thing are very cool uses of Flash Video, I just thought I’d share it here

Cheerio