Facade

Detecting a user's presence with face detection

Presence update notification

Facade is a small program that tries to determine a user's presence using a webcam and face detection algorithms. If no face has been detected for a certain period (e.g. 10 seconds), it assumes the user is away from his desk (or at least not paying attention to the screen).

Facade has a custom status icon that pops up notification bubbles whenever a presence change occurs. It also sets the user's IM status by connecting to Pidgin's D-Bus interface.

The software is licensed under the GNU GPL.

Download the latest version: facade-20091030.tar.gz

The latest code can be checked out on Github.

Face detection

Dependencies

GNU/Linux

* Most likely already installed on your GNU/Linux distribution.

Windows

There is currently minimal support for Windows through the simple_winclient.py script, which just prints out the detected status.

  • a webcam
  • Python
  • ctypes (included by default as of Python 2.5)
  • OpenCV

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gary Bishop and Minh-Tri Pham for CVtypes, an easy-to-use ctypes-based wrapper for OpenCV.