So, after spending hours trying to get OpenCV running on my Mac, I decided to go down a completely different route and see what you can find on a Microsoft stack. There’s face recognition on Azure Cognitive Services, but I was after a face tracking solution, so wanted something that ran locally on my box. After playing a bit with Visual Studio for Mac, I went a different route and downloading a Windows 10 Dev Environment as a complete Virtual Box image.
The image came with a set of samples that puts UWP through its paces, including a face tracking demo. I managed to get this running after a bit of messing around and it seems to do the job:
I still felt however that OpenCV seemed to produce better results, and it’s very much more configurable. The face tracking/detection routines in UWP are baked into the platform, which makes it easy to detect faces and hard to detect anything else. When I find some more time, I’ll have a play with Accord.Net, an image processing and machine learning framework. Should be fun!