This blog is about writing software that can detect faces and the different facial components; e.g., eyeys, noses, mouths, etc. However, the inspiration for this project is Alexithymia;
a personality trait of people who have difficulty indentifying emotions. Most people who are aware of this condition, associate it with Autism. Autistic people have a hard time recognizing facial expressions, but that is because 85% of Autistic people have the comorbid trait of Alexithymia; 50% of Autistic people have extreme Alexithymia. My idea was to create a program that could detect emotions in facial expressions, and report them back to the user. This would allow people suffering from extreme Alexithymia to respond correctly to other people. E.g., somebody might say, "That's just great!", with a big smile on their face; they really meant that something was just great. Somebody else might say, "That's just great!", with a big frown on their face; they are being sarcastic, and are actually upset. Somebody with a severe case of Alexithymia might respond inapropriately in this example, but with a handy dandy facial recognition program they'd tell somebody they were happy for them in the first example, but ask them what was wrong in the second example.
The picture on the left is of Jenny McCarthy; the input to facial.py. The picture on the right is the output of facial.py. As you can see, facial.py correctly identified Jenny McCarthy's face and her eyes. I copied some Python code (I've never actually written anything in Python) off of the Internet for identifying faces and their eyes. This code was a demo for some of the capabilities of the software package, OpenCV. To get it to run, I installed Anaconda on my PC; Anaconda is a Python release that comes loaded with a bunch of modules; modules I would've had to add for just about any other Python release. I also downloaded OpenCV and import it into my Python script; OpenCV contains the Viola Jones algorithm for facial detection. I followed the directions created by Johnny Chan to do this stuff; http://mathalope.co.uk/2015/05/07/opencv-python-how-to-install-opencv-python-package-to-anaconda-windows/
Here's the code I used to process the Jenny McCarthy jpeg:
facial.py haarcascade_eye.xml haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml
