Show HN: Simple Face Recognition Attendance System (opens in new tab)

I'm sorry to say this because you probably worked hard and did a good technical job. But as AI/DL experts we always need to think about ethical concerns related to our work, and I would not want to release code like this online for free.

I'm very well aware that with just a bit of technical knowledge this can be reproduced by others even without this repo. And of course all sorts of organizations and governments can do this in a second. But this shouldn't stop us from remembering that this kind of thing is not a toy, and I would not like to make life easier for somebody that doesn't know much about ML, but is very happy to be served an easy solution to whatever their morally dodgy problem is.

Me and my friend had thought about this idea back when we were in college except we were doing it for class attendance.

The professor would take a snap with his phone and then app would give attendance in single shot. Dived into it a little and realized face detection is easy while face recognition is not.

One more thing we were wondering about was how to bypass this attendance system and realized that a photo of individual is enough to proxy his attendance.

Cool project btw.

This does seem cool, but I would also not want to come to your party if you're going to be running facial recognition on me...

While this is only a personal project for fun, please keep in mind that some countries, such as Germany, have strict laws about personal data. And even if they do not have those, as the developer you are always responsible for your code and the data you gather. Face recognition is a mighty and scary tool, so maybe you can use it to teach your guests in a fun way about it?

Also, many face recognition systems are based on open source datasets that are NOT balanced. This can lead to your non-white, non-male friends being not recognized ect. This is both a real problem and also to a dampened mood at your party. Have fun, but be safe and conscious about it!

You make reference to a "weights" folder, but I'm not seeing it in the repo - am I looking in the wrong place?

EDIT: My mistake, you said it was in the library repo and there it was. For anyone who needs it - https://github.com/justadudewhohacks/face-api.js

Very neat demo. I can imagine putting something like this into a sort of robot butler for house-guests. "I'm afraid the person you're seeking isn't in right now; shall I tell them you called?" Of course, people don't really call on each other these days as they did in the Victorian era.

Any plans to add face authentication and liveliness?