Question : Face Recognition / Iris Recognition

I have been given the project to research face regonition

Here is example of what I am looking to do:

take a digital picture, be able to automatically Crop and center the head, and be able to find the IRIS of the eye and then put a mask over it, all automated.

I am not asking how to do that, but what software apps would I use to get the job done.

I have found:

 The Mathworks, Inc. (makers of Matlab)  at least $1900 from what I saw # Octave (free alternative to Matlab)  http://www.octave.org/octave.html
# TeLa (free alternative to Matlab)    http://www.ava.fmi.fi/prog/tela.html
# RLaB (free alternative to Matlab)    http://rlab.sourceforge.net/ Not recommended because no longer being developed
# Scilab (free alternative to Matlab)  http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/


But I am not sure if these are the right track for what I need to do.

Thanks!

Randy

Answer : Face Recognition / Iris Recognition

That is a tough one....I think people have spent entire Ph.D.'s just working on parts of that, and unless you're able to make the pictures pretty consistent in terms of positioning, I doubt if you'll be able to get very far.

As for the math programs, those are all good choices, matlab probably being the best, but somewhat expensive. As far as the other packages, I would recommend Octave and Scilab, although if you're working on Windows, octave is harder to install. I've never actually used Scilab, but I have used the other two and recommend them. Matlab in particular has quite a bit of image processing code available.

If your pictures are somewhat predictable, you may just be able to crop within a given area, and then recognize the face by identifying pixel color or something (the best would probably be to have a background that is nothing like any skin color). On the other hand, I might be really impressed by what's possible, so don't cut yourself short I guess.

You sound serious about solving this problem,so I assume you must be a pretty mathematical/scientific person. If so, you might get some milage out of these websites, at least for starting ideas:

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~sis26/Eigenface%20Tutorial.htm
http://lcavwww.epfl.ch/~zpecenov/DSPMP/eigenfaces/html/
http://home.t-online.de/home/Robert.Frischholz/face.htm
http://egweb.mines.edu/eges512/projects/face/cobb.pdf
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/loadFile.do?objectId=4408&objectType=File
http://www.vorburger.ch/projects/faces/report.html
http://www.vorburger.ch/projects/faces/matlab.html

Hope that helps,
Matt