Facial recognition and operating Widget Designer

[madmod42]

Hello everyone.

Recently we have been asked to set up a project for a theatre here and one of the questions we have been asked a lot is if we can make a program with widget designer where we use facial recognition to start up a system and do a speaker check. One of the things I had mentioned to them is that if this was for security reasons they could just have a regular tablet use its facial recognition ability to open up and display the widget designer window (personally a better option) but they are wanting to start the whole system with it.
Is it possible to send a command to widget designer when the facial recognition is done on a tablet/computer or is there a camera setup anyone is aware of that would make this possible?
(If it is possible to do it in Widget Designer as well that would be great).

We are using WD 6.1.3.

Because of other capabilities of the widget designer we are more than likely going to be doing this so any ideas would be appreciated.

[justyn roy]

While we do have face tracking built into Widget - it is only for tracking.
You cannot use this feature to authenticate a user.

What is the software you're using that does the facial recognition/authentication on the computer/tablet?
It may be possible to have that software send a command to Widget with a unique UserID and something like a password to say "This is the user who's face I just saw"

This authentication work would be done outside of Widget - and Widget will simply receive a command over a network connection.

Is it possible to add to your facial recognition software?

[madmod42]

Hey Justyn,

We have not decided on a software yet. We have just started the look into this so not 100% sure what software would be the best for this.
Do you have any recommendations for software or any ideas of what might be a good start?

I was curious as to whether or not there can be something done with the preinstalled facial login done with windows.

[justyn roy]

I don't have any experience with this type of software.

I think you should start with your requirements - is this for a secure space?
There is a difference between recognition - "Who are you?" and authentication - "Are you who you say you are?"

So the question to you is, how important is security?

And, do you have access to the internet on the system that will be doing this authentication?
I've looked into using AWS to do the authentication process for a project that didn't ever take off, but of course, you'd need internet access for this.

[madmod42]

With what we are trying to do it would be aimed at authenticating.
With the system we are talking about now, we will also be able to access the internet.

[justyn roy]

In that case, you could look into AWS's service.
Again, I've not used it - I simply searched for "Facial authentication"
This also looks fairly affordable to be used with whichever application you build to support it:
https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/?nc=sn&loc=0&blog-cards.sort-by=item.additionalFields.createdDate&blog-cards.sort-order=desc

You can have the service process 1000 images for free per month, and it's only $0.001 per image after 1000 are processed.

Once you build that application, you can have it communicate with the Widget Designer several different ways - including TCP, UDP and HTTP to send a command containing the Username and "Is logged in" for example.

I hope this helps!