Okay, here’s my blog post about my “Where’s Michael” experiment, written in a casual, personal style:
So, I had this kinda dumb idea the other day. I was watching some show, and a character was hard to find, and it just popped into my head: Could I make a little program to, like, automatically find someone in a video? I decided to give it a shot, calling it “Where’s Michael”.
First, I needed some video. I grabbed a random clip I had lying around – a bunch of people milling about at a party. Total chaos, which was perfect. I figured finding someone in that would be a good test.
The Hunt Begins
I started poking around, trying different things. I messed with some basic image recognition stuff first. I found this ready-made face detection. It was super simple to set up, I literally just wrote a few lines, and boom, it was drawing boxes around faces.
- Import Stuff: Got the code libraries I needed. Easy peasy.
- Load the Video: Pointed the script at my party video.
- Loop Through Frames: Told it to look at each frame of the video, one by one.
- Find Faces: Used that face detection thingy.
- Draw Boxes: Made it put a rectangle around any face it found.
It worked! Well, sort of. It found faces, alright, but it found all the faces. Not just Michael’s. I needed a way to, you know, tell it which face was actually Michael’s.
Getting Specific
I figured, what the heck. I found the way to make it only find the face I want.I needed a sample to show it what to find,and use that pic to recognize.
- Choose a Reference Photo: Picked a good, clear picture of “Michael” – just a random guy from the internet, for testing purposes.
- Detect Features: Use the photo to make recogition.
I ran the thing again, and… there he was! The script was highlighting just “Michael,” even as he moved around in the crowd. Pretty neat, huh?
Lessons Learned
This whole thing was more of a fun afternoon project than anything serious. But it did get me thinking. Here’s the thing:
- It’s surprisingly easy: I was shocked at how quickly I could throw something together.
- Accuracy is tricky: It’s not perfect. Sometimes it would lose “Michael,” or get confused by someone who looked similar.
- Lots of possibilities: You could totally see how this kind of tech could be used for all sorts of stuff, good and bad.
Anyway, that was my little “Where’s Michael” adventure. Might try refining it later, see if I can make it even more accurate. But for now, it’s back to other projects. Just thought I’d share!
