FaceTracker is a library for deformable face tracking written in C using OpenCV 2, authored by Jason Saragih and maintained by Kyle McDonald.

It is available free for non-commercial use, and may be redistributed under these conditions. Please see license.md for complete details. For commercial use, request a quote.

1. "I successfully compiled the code, so why is my app is crashing?" Make sure that your model files are in the right location. If you see the error Assertion failed: s.is_open() when running your app, that means you forgot to put the model files in the right directory.
2. "Is there an example of using FaceTracker on a mobile device?" There is no official example. But there is an example of using ofxFaceTracker on iOS here and a native Android example here.
3. "Why is the tracking is slow, and why is there high CPU usage?" The face detection step (finding the general location of the face) can be slow. If this is causing an issue, you might want to put the tracking in a separate thread. If the detection is very slow you might try using a face detector that is native to your platform, and initializing FaceTracker with that rectangle.

Wrappers are available for:

• Android: facetrackerapp
• openFrameworks: ofxFaceTracker
• Cinder: ciFaceTracker
• Python: pyfacetracker

These instructions are for compiling the code on OS X and Ubuntu, but it should be possible to compile on other platforms.

First, install OpenCV3 (if you're using OpenCV2, use the opencv2 branch of this repo). On OSX you can use homebrew:

$ brew tap homebrew/science
$ brew install opencv3

And on Ubuntu use:

$ sudo apt-get install libcv-dev libopencv-dev

Alternatively, you can download OpenCV from the GitHub and compile it manually.

After installing OpenCV, clone this repository with git clone git://github.com/kylemcdonald/FaceTracker.git. This repository contains a few subdirectories within the root directory:

• src (contains all source code)
• model (contains a pre-trained tracking model)
• bin (will contain the executable after building)

Next, make sure that your copy of OpenCV is located in /usr/local (this should be the case if you used apt-get). If it isn't located there, modify the OPENCV_PATH in the Makefile. If you installed with Homebrew, it should be set to /usr/local/opt/opencv3.

Optionally, you can also add -fopenmp to the CFLAGS and -lgomp to the LIBRARIES variable to compile with OpenMP support.

From the root FaceTracker directory, build the library and example by running make.

To test the demo, cd bin and ./face_tracker. Because many webcams are 1280x720, try running ./face_tracker -s .25 to rescale the image before processing for a smoother framerate.

Usage: face_tracker [options]
Options:
-m <string> : Tracker model (default: ../model/face2.tracker)
-c <string> : Connectivity (default: ../model/face.con)
-t <string> : Triangulation (default: ../model/face.tri)
-s <double> : Image scaling (default: 1)
-d <int>    : Frames/detections (default: -1)
--check     : Check for failure 
--help      : Print help
-?          : Print help