Finish senior design project. Check. Win EWeek competition with project. Check. Make it to finals week alive. Check. Two finals and one project presentation stand between me and sweet sweet victory! Erm, I mean, my Computer Engineering degree. 
Heard from quacking outside my living room window. Here are some pictures from my balcony.
What better way to start off the year. Here are a couple of the things I’ve cooked up over the past two weeks. One old favorite and something new!
Old Favorite - Chicken Adobo
New Creation - Chicken, Shrimp, and Cream Cheese Enchiladas
Good Measure - Pico de Gallo.
Amazing new creation - Chicken/shrimp enchiladas
My last semester for my Computer Engineering (BSCE) degree has arrived! This semester I’m taking (yet another) digital systems class, advanced electronic circuits, embedded systems (focusing on wireless sensor networks), second semester senior design (more on my project later), and political science 100- covering the basics of American government and political power (and will provide me with a better understanding of how our government is suppose to work than Sarah Palin has [see _any_ interview w/ Gov. Palin] ).
So I can catch up!
Apple just released a new version of iLife, including an update to iPhoto called Faces. It detects and tags faces in your pictures with the person’s name. You can see it here: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/#faces
What’s frustrating is this was my semester project for a computer vision course I took in spring of 2008. My solution automatically detected and tagged recognized faces and prompted the user to tag new/unrecognized faces. The program continuously improved on a database of known faces to increase the chance of a positive detection and recognition of known faces (from different angles, lighting, facial hair, etc). To accomplish this I used a combination of the OpenCV computer vision toolkit for face detection (using Viola-Jones / Haar feature cascades)and the Identix SDK for identification statistics and eye locations (as registration coordinates when comparing different sized faces) when comparing facial regions of interest.
While I came up with the idea on my own, I realize it isn’t original. I’m sure Apple and others have been working on an implementation of this before I even had the idea. The real killer is Apple’s Facebook plugin. When I started working on the idea the main application I was envisioned was automatic tagging of your Facebook photos. Anyway, below are some pictures from my class demonstration presentation.
