Hands-on Tutorials

How to make your own Instagram filter with facial recognition using python

Image by teguhjati pras; Creative Commons License via Pixabay

Over the past 10 years, Facial recognition technology has developed rapidly and has quickly developed a variety of uses. From the utilitarian (unlocking your phone), to playful (Instagram filters), to the controversial (security, surveillance, and policing), our faces can be used by tech in many ways. Curious about how to create some facial recognition tech yourself? Facebook offers the SparkAR platform to create facial recognition filters for Facebook and Instagram. However, we can pretty easily create one ourselves using the OpenCV package in python, so we can use facial recognition anywhere.

Background Info: How do computers “see”?

To a computer, images are just a series of numbers indicating where pixels are located. Computer programmers can create algorithms that teach computers how to identify unique features in images. Interestingly, computers “see” similarly to how humans solve jigsaw puzzles. Consider the image below:

Image by Bill Selak; Creative Commons License via Flickr

Puzzle pieces that are apart of the clover are easy to place because they have distinct shapes…