A new version (2.2.0) of the Accord.NET Framework has just been released. This new version introduces many new features, fixes and improvements. The most interesting additions are certainly the HeadController and FaceController .NET components.
The Accord.NET Controller components can be used to generate events based on webcam motion. By using a combination of HaarCascadeClassifiers, Camshift and Template-based Tracking, those components are able to detect when a face enters scene, leaves the scene, and moves across a scene.
The video above shows only the sample application which comes together with the framework. However, the interesting part is that this is just a sample of what can be accomplished using the real controller components. The controller components are .NET components, similar to Button, Label or Timer, and can be dragged and dropped from Visual Studio’s ToolBox directly into any application.
Once inside an application, it will be possible to set event actions just as in any other .NET component:
The controls have built-in support for calibration. All values except tilting angle are passed to the hosting application in the [-1;+1] range, in which -1 indicates either a total left/down/backwards position and +1 indicates a total right/up/forward position. The tilting angle is given in radians. Please note that the face controller is still a bit experimental and still requires some tuning.
This new version also introduces HSL Color Range object trackers, more default Haar Cascades, an experimental version of linear-chain Conditional Random Fields, and the ability to generate hardcoded C# definitions of any Haar cascade available in the OpenCV XML format. There is also initial support for finger detection using new implementations for Border-Following contour extraction, K-Curvatures and Convex Hull Defects extraction. On the statistics side, there has been the inclusion of the Von-Mises distribution, Moving and Running Normal distributions and improvements in the Multivariate Gaussian implementation. The full release notes are available in the release's download page.
Also, a special thanks to Professor Dr. Modesto Castrillón Santana to let me embed some of his Haar definitions into the framework under the LGPL license. Please be sure to include a reference to his work if you plan to use this in an academic publication.
As always, I hope those additions and improvements will be useful to everyone :-)
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