project:picturethis

This wiki is the archive of the Make Open Data camps and hackathons that the Opendata.ch community has run since 2011. Current events and projects are on opendata.ch, questions go to the forum.

A connected picture frame displaying historic images

farm9.staticflickr.com_8681_16672996925_ec53c13c61.jpg

Story

  • The Picture This “smart” frame shows police photographs of homeless people by Carl Durheim (1810-1890)
  • By looking at a picture, you trigger a face detection algorithm to analyse both, you and the homeless person
  • The algorithm detects gender, age and mood of the person on the portrait (not always right)
  • You, as a spectator, become part of the system / algorithm judging the homeless person
  • The person on the picture is at the mercy of the spectator, once again

farm9.staticflickr.com_8631_16485421338_40e86f1bce.jpg farm9.staticflickr.com_8608_16671627211_074399694d.jpg

  • Picture frame has a camera doing face detection for presence detection
  • Pictures have been pre-processed using a cloud service
  • Detection is still rather slow (should run faster on the Raspi 2)

farm9.staticflickr.com_8608_16672997165_b32d138ee9.jpg farm9.staticflickr.com_8577_16671979502_b6a4cc5bd0.jpg farm9.staticflickr.com_8611_16673072845_aea4ee6a02_z.jpg

  • Who were those people? Why were they homeless? What was their crime?
  • How would we treat them? How will they / we be treated tomorrow? (by algorithms)
  • @ram00n
  • @tamberg
  • and you
  1. Download the pictures to the Raspi and display one of them (warmup)
  2. Slideshow and turning the images 90° to adapt to the screensize
  3. Play around with potentiometer and Arduino to bring an analog input onto the Raspi (which only has digital I/O)
  4. Connect everything and adapt the slideshow speed with the potentiometer
  5. Display the name (extracted from the filename) below the picture

next steps, more ideas:

  1. Use the Raspi Cam to detect a visitor in front of the frame and stop the slideshow
  2. Use the Raspi Cam to take a picture of the face of the visitor
  3. Detect faces in the camera picture
  4. Detect faces in the images [DONE, manually, using online service]
  5. …merge visitor and picture faces :-)
  • project/picturethis.txt
  • Last modified: 2026/09/26 09:16
  • by opendata.ch