Big Data Camera

We use face detection to collect information of customers for companies and show chart and table of data on webpage.

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Inspiration

Computer vision can revolutionize the whole world. Digital cameras can be used not only for photoing, but also for data collecting--big data, which may cost lots of money traditionally. Therefore, our Big Data Camera builds a convenient and efficient customer information collection system for enterprises and shopping malls.

What it does

The camera will automatically take photos of customers' faces when they walk into the store, which need to be controlled by sensors.In our application, the photos are captured manually because of lacking hardware. The Microsoft Face API is able to gain age and gender for each face in the picture uploaded.Our application can upload a large amount of photos automatically and analyze the data. Then it stores the information of customers for companies and shows charts of data on webpage.

How we built it

Using visual stdio, we developed our program with c#. The most important part of our project is Face Detection which can detect human faces in an image and returns face locations, and optionally with faceIds, landmarks, and attributes. This time, we only focus on returning some of attributes such as age and gender which are useful for companies.

  1. Enable camera to automatically take photos of people when camera receives signal(Manually for the demo)
  2. Use Microsoft-Face-API to collect information of customers with the photos
  3. Analyze the data of customers and convert the data into charts
  4. Build a website which shows statistical charts with html5.

Challenges we ran into

  1. First time to use c#, and html5. We have to learn before we started using it.
  2. We couldn't run the sample code of API. The API is not so user-friendly. But we finally figured out how the sample worked and ran the code.
  3. First time to use API. Invisible source code makes our work difficult.
  4. Wifi is not stable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Use c# to capture and analyze customers' pictures.
  2. Build a beautiful webpage for our project.
  3. Pretty Cool Prototype!

What We learned

  1. How to use Microsoft-Face-API
  2. Use c# and html5 to take picture through webcam

What's next for Big Data Camera

  1. Improve the accuracy of the data collected by face detection.
  2. Apply the data-collecting technology for other fields such as finding criminals, or any funny applications.
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