Realtime Facial Recognition.md

Realtime Facial Recognition

I started this project as a way to build an implementation of realtime facial recogniton for use in a company timeclock software & hardware solution.

I was planning, initially, on utilizing a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to run the software and a connected Arducam as the camera interface. However, it's becoming clear that this is configuration is very likely to change. Installing dlib on my pi02w took ~12 hours. Not practical at all.

Supported Hardware and OS's

The camera hardware implementation has been written as an abstract factory, so that essentially you can use any type of camera hardware and any OS as long as it supports python. Currently, Darwin (macOS) and Linux (specifically Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W) have implemented classes in the CameraFactory.

dlib and pi02w

I have included steps in the installation instructions on how to build dlib with minimal requirements, as it was the only way I was able to get it installed.

Linux Installation (Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W)

Run the following commands before installing the Python package requirements:

Install system dependencies

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential cmake pkg-config
sudo apt install -y python3-dev python3-pip
sudo apt install -y libatlas-base-dev gfortran
sudo apt install -y libopenblas-dev

Create and activate virtual environment

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Install numpy first

pip3 install numpy

If installing on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 (W), install picamera2

pip install picamera2

Increase swapfile space to prevent out-of-memory issues from dlib installation

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
sudo sed -i 's/CONF_SWAPSIZE=100/CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048/' /etc/dphys-swapfile
sudo dphys-swapfile setup
sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

Clone dlib and build with minimal requirements

git clone https://github.com/davisking/dlib.git
cd dlib
python3 setup.py install --no DLIB_USE_CUDA  

Remove swapfile

sudo swapoff -a
sudo rm /swapfile

Edit fstab with sudo nano /etc/fstab and look for the line that contains swapfile and comment it out or remove it.

Double check the swapfile has been removed with free -h

Install the required Python packages

pip3 install -r requirements.txt  

Create symlinks to the system python packages that we need to use in our virutal environment

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/libcamera* .venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/picamera2* .venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pykms* .venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/kms* .venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/_pykms* .venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/