Getting Haar cascade data
Your installation of OpenCV 5 should contain a subfolder called data. The path to this folder is stored in an OpenCV variable called cv2.data.haarcascades.
The data folder contains XML files that can be loaded by an OpenCV class called cv2.CascadeClassifier. An instance of this class interprets a given XML file as a Haar cascade, which provides a detection model for a type of object such as a face. cv2.CascadeClassifier can detect this type of object in any image. As usual, we could obtain a still image from a file, or we could obtain a series of frames from a video file or a video camera.
From the data folder, we will use the following cascade files:
haarcascade_frontalface_default.xml
haarcascade_eye.xmlAs their names suggest, these cascades are for detecting faces and eyes. They require a frontal, upright view of the subject. We will use them later when building a face detector.
If you are curious about how these cascade files are generated, you can find...
