Intro: Facial recognition

(mechanical whirring)…- [Instructor] Hello, and welcome to the fifth problem…of the Code Clinic series.…This is a challenge to find faces in a photograph.…50 years ago this problem would have been difficult…or impossible.…The technology and algorithms for facial recognition…were just being created.…Computers were barely powerful enough to run the algorithms,…and it could take hours to recognize one face.…

Today, we have real time performance…and use it as a security device on some mobile computers.…In this challenge, we're asking our authors…to demonstrate how to do this…with their programming language.…We've challenged our authors to create a function…that does the following.…First, the function should accept a JPEG, GIF, or PNG file…of varying dimensions.…Their function should then identify the number of faces…in that image.…There may not be any faces, in which case the function…should return zero.…

If the author chooses to go for extra credit,…their function can create a copy of the image…with the faces visually identified,…