In my Social Stories blog I stated that the executables I downloaded from https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~m.rezaei/Tutorials/Creating_a_Cascade_of_Haar-Like_Classifiers_Step_by_Step.pdf didn't seem to work with the images I had downloaded off of the Internet. I fiddled around with the batch files and got everything working. ...but when I got home one night, I found my PC powered off (my cat must've jumped on it when I was away, and hit the power button), cutting short a haartraining session (to create a new haarcascade smiles xml file) that had been running for a week. I'd set the haartraining session to use 25 stages, and it was working on the 25th stage (0 through 24) when cut short, so I went with the data that already had been processed to create smiles.xml but it isn't finding any smiles (haarcascade_smile.xml, which comes with the opencv package does find some smiles, but it doesn't work very well).
As of this writing I've restarted the haartraining session, with the difference that I just added another 400 negative images before restarting. I also increased the size of the area the program scans at a time, from 20px to 25px (width and height); I'm hoping that speeds up processing a little. Hopefully my next post shows a working smile detection program (i.e., I hope my cat doesn't mess me up again).
