The blog post is a little light on details. Just go to the source and demo on the original creator's site: http://liuliu.me/detect/detect.html
Canvas allows access to individual pixels in an image, and JS is arguably faster than BASIC interpreters of the 80s. Fun things lie ahead in client-side image processing.
EDIT: Incidentally, the code is pretty hairy and has about 3 comments. It's hard to figure out what ML approach he's using from a cursory look.
EDIT: Aah, definitely an image pyramid in there, so some multi-resolution stuff happening.
I don't know too much about face detection, can you anyone tell which algorithm the author is using? It doesn't work on a lot of pictures so I was wondering if this is the best face detection algorithm available?
I didn't look at the source in detail, but almost all face detection systems today (including those implemented in hardware in cameras) use a variant of Viola and Jones' Haar-Like Cascade Detector [1].
The major exception is work from CMU and PittPatt [2], which uses Neural Networks [3].
(press the Detect button when the page loads)
That is impressive.