How to locate and measure the distance between face features using LabVIEW?

[ckho1125]

Hi all,

I am new to Labview and may I ask how to locate the features of human face and then measure the distance between them?

Many thanks!

BR,

Kenneth

[Bob_Schor]

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@ckho1125 wrote:

I am new to Labview and may I ask how to locate the features of human face and then measure the distance between them?

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Hello, Kenneth, welcome to the LabVIEW Forum(please note the spelling/capitalization of LabVIEW).  You've picked a challenging problem, one that you can accomplish in LabVIEW, but one that perhaps is best done with the Vision Development Module, one of the most complex and under-documented Modules that I've encountered.

If you are serious about learning how to do this, I would recommend that you seek out a LabVIEW Developer with experience with NI Vision and "apprentice" yourself to him/her for about half a year, particularly if you want to develop software that will "find" features in the images and use the found features for the measurements.  The other thing you could do is to use LabVIEW to acquire an image of a face, use "manual" tools to locate (on the Image) the features you want to measure, and have LabVIEW compute the distances between these features.  This could probably be done in an apprenticeship of a few months.  [I served as the mentor for a bright BME undergraduate looking at quantifying fluid flow from infrared imaging of the human hand after injection of fluorescent dye -- we spent 4-6 months on this].

Don't get discouraged, however -- just because you picked a particularly challenging problem, you can still learn LabVIEW at your own pace, get as expert as you can on it (write lots of programs/exercises, get someone to give you "Style" and "Design" pointers, learn what else in addition to Image Processing, such as acquiring Engineering Data and controlling Engineering Processes, it excels at), and then take on the Difficult Challenges.

Bob Schor

[altenbach]

Do you have a problem with LabVIEW, image acquisition, or with the actual algorithm. What is your hardware?

I assume you are talking about output from a camera. Do you have problems getting the picture into the code?

Once you have the picture, you have two main problems:

• recognizing "features" and their location in pixel coordinates. This is the hard part! Do you have software that does this already?
• Translating the pixel unit distances into real world distances. For that you need calibrations based on the lens and sensor characteristics and the distance to the subject.

Interesting project. Can you tell us more about your hardware, etc.