That'ssss some very nice Python code there...

Well it has been a busy week of work on my dissertation and so with out messing around lets dive straight into what I have been up to.

Firstly I have handed in my project specification in on Friday and got feedback on The following Tuesday. The feedback was very helpful and helped clear up some thing such as focusing me more on target rather than trying to solve everything. As a result of this feedback my goals are even more clear now and they are to work on counting people in a crowd and determining if the crowd is calm or not. Other areas for improvement include my bibliography which did not have all the relevant information on some of the references.

As well as this I have been carrying on my reading and spent a long time trying to get OpenCV installed for Python on Ubuntu 14.04. I got shown a nice way of installing OpenCV via pip which is a nice way of installing stuff for Python. It installed but when I tried to run any test code with windows it was throwing dependency issues. So I looked around and found this nice tutorial which helped resolve some of my issues but still had an issue with gtk. This answer managed to fix the issue and I was up and running. I have also been learning a lot about Python such as how to be modular and returning tuples, example code below.


def tuple_return_function():
        return ("10", "20")

def function_name();
        tuple1, tuple2 = tuple_return_function()

        print("Tuple1 is " + tuple1 + " Tuple2 is " + tuple2)
       # Outputs: 'Tuple1 is 10 Tuple2 is 20'


Once I was up and running I got to work trying different OpenCV implemented methods using this site. As such I got some nice SIFT and SURF and a interactive foreground extraction using GrabCut algorithm. For SIFT and SURF I also made it loop so it only found a specific number of points so wouldn't detect everything. These helped me understand the basic functionality such as loading in images, copying them and converting them to grey and other basic stuff. You can see some examples below.

SURF - Before and after

GrabCut - Before and after

SIFT - Before and after

I have also started working on some code that will be used in the final system. Currently I have a Python file that is used for reading in image files from a directory as well as a basic implementation of Viola-Jones. Once I am happy with my implementation I will then begin writing tests for both the reading in image files and the Viola-Jones. I will be starting on implementing histograms of oriented gradients for human detection next after the tests are implemented.


I am having some issues with the Viola-Jones implementation for detecting faces in a crowd and it isn't that the faces are obstructed. It seems to be that the faces are too far away to be picked up. I am having a look at this and seeing if I can tweak some settings.