Comparing Images

[agno3bassist]

I am rather new to the programming world and my main area I concentrate in is databases. Now my dilemma is that I want to start a new project that is way out of my league and I need someone to help direct my thoughts.

I want to try an ID system where I have images of employees in my company and then when they sit in front of a PC have cam get an image of them and then compare it with the database allowing me to identify them. I want to use this more as a utility than a security system though.

My thoughts were to compare a bitmap color count and then match that. Would that work?
Has anyone attempted something similar?

Ciao
Paul

[sotoasty]

Welcome to the world of heavy duty graphics programming. I can't imagine anyway you could do a color count of an image, then of a Cam picture and have anything work out close to what you want. First off, any variation in Position, lighting, clothes, facial color (flushed/pale), Jewelry and many other factors could come into play. Then even if you do keep all of these factors the same, you could easily end up with several employees with the same color count. I think you are going to have to work with some sort of Facial analysis program. Something that would compare the ratio/differences in the width of the eyes/ears/chin/nose....

Sorry I am not much help, but I hope you have good luck in your endeaver.

[Robin Dude]

As was already mentioned, this kind of thing is far from easy to deal with even under ideal conditions. Facial recognition programs, AFAIK, are one of the many Holy Grails of computer programming at the moment, along with voice recognition and artificial intelligence. All of them exist on some level, but they're not very sophisticated. I think you'd probably be better off trying to get fingerprint ID or retinal ID. Those, at least, have been around and in reasonable working order for a while. How you'd collect it is another matter.

Then again, I could be way off-base with my understanding of where the technology stands at the moment.

However even without that, you could always set up the much easier ID if you've got a small number of employees: Capture an image of the employee and have a human compare it to a previous photo of that employee. If I'm right about the state of the art of facial recognition by computer, then humans can make these judgements much better and much faster. The problem is that it takes time and if you have a lot of employees it's not really a valid option.

[agno3bassist]

Great!! :)
This was the sort of response I was looking for, Thanks guys this will actually help me a lot more than you think. Well at least my thoughts are sort of pointing in the right direction. Will keep everyone posted

Ciao