This is the base for the face detection, in case you are wondering and don't want to dig through the code:

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/FaceDetection

It's perhaps worth pointing out that this software is for detecting the presence of any old face, not for detecting a particular face, such as you or Osama Bin Laden.

Right, detecting who is in a picture would be "face recognition". Good point though.

Does it only do human faces? Could it detect my dog, or a Cubist rendering? (Face detection in non-photographic art could be quite lucrative, I imagine.)

In general, just human faces. But I had a friend tell me they drew a picture of a face on a whiteboard and it detected it.

Almost definitely won't detect a dog. :)

Not that github should be the only location of open source, but does anybody else find themselves surprised when they come across code samples that don't use it?

I tend to see just as many using code.google.com/p.

That's probably a good place for it. I guess I felt like posting it to github would be turning it into a "project", which definitely isn't the goal but I suppose I could just dump code there for the taking. Other folks do it. =\

Most github links appear to be code dumps, not projects (or, at least, what I would consider projects).

My definition of a 'project' includes documentation, stable releases (ie, tar/zip archives), issue tracking, mailing lists -- these things seem to be perennially missing from most github projects I encounter.

I was surprised when I saw a link to a tgz file. I almost put it into a Github repo, but the code didn't come with a license.

Good point about the license. Consider it public domain. I'll make a note about it on the blog entry.

I'll slap it up on github in a few and update the links.

http://github.com/beetlebugorg/PictureMe/tree/master

Not for nothing, I think it might be best to give it an explicit license. I would suggest the MIT license ( http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php ) if you want to be public-domain-esque.

It turns out that just advising to consider it public domain doesn't carry much legal standing, neither in protecting you, nor in ensuring people can get it past their laywers.

I'm surprised they didn't include an option to specify how many faces you want it to detect before taking the picture.

I agree often you want two people plus the background.