[Digikam-devel] Updated GSoC Proposal

[Aditya Bhatt]

Hi,

@Alex : This is my GSoC proposal for this project. What do you say?

@Marcel : Many thanks for the feedback. I've updated my proposal and made it
more specific.

 Mention on what test data this is based?
>

We've been testing our own pictures with frontal faces, and the detection is
good. More cascades used in tandem == better detection accuracy. For profile
and side faces, it is a trivial matter of applying more cascades. This
increases the accuracy, but decreases the speed, I'll be working on that. It
involves a tradeoff between image size and good detection. I can decrease
image size to dramatically increase detection speed, but accuracy goes down.
I can think of a lot of solutions for this, they will come in the subsequent
commits.

Make clear you're talking about digikam code here.
> (This refers to the current preview widget in digikam. We are (I am) unsure
> at
> the moment about it's technological future, but that's not your problem for
> this proposal.)


Ok, I haven't mentioned the Qt4 porting of the preview widget this time.
That would anyway have been too much work, I guess.

There was talk about a Eigen/Fisherfaces and GSL library integration? If
> that's going to be a major chunk of work, mention it.


Ok, mentioned.


> You can also mention Nepomuk here, at least as possible integration. PIMO
> is
> the relevant ontology:
> http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/PimoOntology
>

Mentioned now, as optional work.

So here's my new proposal :

----------------------------------------
Project: Face Recognition
----------------------------------------

Name : Aditya Bhatt

E-mail : adityabhatt1991 at gmail.com

Freenode/IRC : Adityab

Location : Ahmedabad, India

Proposal Title: Automatic face detection, recognition, and tagging in
digiKam

--------------------------------------
Motivation
--------------------------------------

digiKam has always been my photo management program of choice. When coupled
with KIPI, it becomes something akin to the swiss army knife of all photo
management suites.
One of the most demanded features of digiKam has been the automatic tagging
of photograps with names of the people in them by detecting faces and
recongizing who's who.
In KDE's bugzilla, this is the feature request for digiKam with the most
votes since a long time, and is the 26th most wanted feature in all of KDE.

digiKam will benefit a lot from this. Picasa's linux version does not have
face recognition, nor does F-Spot have it. So digiKam will, as far as I
know, be the first linux suite to have this feature.
This feature will be very useful for searching and organizing. After
everything is implemented in digiKam, nepomuk/akonadi integration can be
done.

-------------------------------------
Implementation
-------------------------------------

I've already been working with Alex Jironkin, the mentor for this project,
on libface, the library that will be used to provide the biometric
functionality.
libface is currently hosted on sourceforge :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libface/

The summer work will involve working on both finishing libface and digiKam.

Our interface for libface is almost ready, and from what I learned from
Marcel, requires a minimal amount of polishing, related to accepting image
data. The face detection part works pretty good for images with frontal
faces.
The detection is tested using our respective personal albums.

Apart from improving the eigenfaces part for face recognition, I intend to
work on the fisherfaces algorithm - which is known to provide better results
with pose and lighting variation than eigenfaces.
I will also decide a proper face database to accompany libface before GSoC
coding starts, so that better testing can be done and results can be
benchmarked and compared by us and future developers.

This will require usage of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). I'm getting
familiar with fisherfaces, and have some MATLAB code for it. I will port
some to C++ and incorporate it into libface.
Some work already has been done by Alex on this in libface.

I intend to implement a face tagging widget - this will involve modifying
the nepomuk-peopletag project, and might take a while.

The face tagging widget will be merged into digiKam. The format of the tags
to be generated will be decided after some discussions. The face detector
will decide the region to be tagged, and the recognition part will decide
the contents of the tag.

Now I'll work on storing tags in the image metadata and digiKam's database.
I'll need help from the digiKam core people on this.

This is what I intend to do as part of GSoC.

If there is still time, I'd like to start with nepomuk integration using
PIMO. Since I'm not familiar with nepomuk, I'll need lots of help from
Marcel and the nepomuk people for that.

------------------------------------
Tentative Schedule
------------------------------------

First half of May:
Get familiar with the digiKam team, learn about digiKam's databases, how
tags are organized, and start writing some working code for a plugin.
Work on libface meanwhile - Start porting Fisherfaces snippets from MATLAB
to C++. Get familiar with GSL.

Mid-May to Mid-June:
Finish Fisherfaces. Create a working version of a people-tagging widget.

Mid-June to Beginning of July:
Make the people tagging widget work nicely with libface. This will have a
possible voting system.

Start of July to July-End:
Start integrating the tagging widget and libface combo into digiKam. Might
involve possible changes to how to accept tag input from user. Work more on
the voting system for training.

August:
Clean-up of code, write documentation on usage of the new feature, and kill
bugs :) Maybe start possible akonadi/nepomuk work.

-----------------------------------
About Me
-----------------------------------

I'm a second-year engineering student currently doing my Bachelors in
Information and Communication Technology.
I've been using linux since about 1999, when I was eight or nine. I used X11
interfaces, and what I think was KDE at that time. I used gnome and windows
from 2003 to 2006, then went back to KDE. I loved and still love KDE because
of it's immense configurability. The new explosion of incoming developers
and artists into KDE is wonderful, and I love the way new features are being
rapidly integrated into KDE SC.

My primary fields of interest are Image Processing, Pattern Recognition,
Cryptography, and Mathematical Computing.

I'm quite familiar with C and C++.

I speak on FOSS topics in my University's Open-Source Society, and also
about emerging computing trends in our IEEE student branch's TechTalks.

A few links:
My bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/aditya_bhatt/
My Blog : http://adityabhatt.wordpress.com
Libface : http://sourceforge.net/projects/libface/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-devel/attachments/20100323/a695f6ad/attachment.html>