Archive for the 'Dogs' Category

Back in the days I had a serious problem as a dog owner. The problem was related to the fact that when I was not in my flat, Tito kept jumping and sleeping on the couch. This sucks in several ways. Saliva and hair are usually transferred to your clothes and removing them is incredibly painful. Furthermore, during daytime Tito has to stay home by himself. Tito knew that the couch was forbidden, but guess what happened when I was not home…

By the way, at that time I wrote a dummy Python/OpenCV script to detect brown moving objects (read: dogs) moving on a brighter background (read: the couch). In case of detection, a sound with my voice was played. I have to admit that the thing was working generally well, specially because in a couple of days Tito became really afraid of the couch. I guess the whole trick was done by the dog earing my voice without seeing (smelling?) me.

By the way, this is an example of the detection:

A couple of days ago I was asked by one of my usual contractors if it was possible to use a webcam to detect whether a person is in front of the computer. The whole idea is have a page in the intranet that tells everybody if you are in your office or not. Although I believe that this kind of stuff is generally evil, I started reading this Face Detection using OpenCV howto. It looks like everything is more or less there, so it’s an easy job that can be carried on with the rest.

I will suggest to my contractor to play a track with the voice of the CEO as soon as the employee leaves his computer.