Facade
Detecting a user's presence with face detection
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.
Dependencies
GNU/Linux
- a supported webcam
- Python *
- ctypes (included by default as of Python 2.5)
- OpenCV
- PyGTK (for the GUI)
- python-notify
- python-dbus
- dbus *
- hal *
* 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.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gary Bishop and Minh-Tri Pham for CVtypes, an easy-to-use ctypes-based wrapper for OpenCV.