Chapter 7. Affine Transformations and Face Alignment

We started with the problem of face detection in the previous chapter. Also, towards the end, we mentioned that merely detecting faces in images, although not a trivial problem, isn't the end in itself. Once faces have been detected, endless possibilities open up in front of us-we could identify whom the face belongs to, predict the gender of the person, or maybe even try to guess the age! As part of this book, we are going to tackle one of these issues-gender detection from facial images.

This chapter is a natural continuation of the previous one. Our main focus will shift from explaining the usage of OpenCV functions (which has been the theme of the book so far) to demonstrating how OpenCV can help us in designing and implementing solutions to complex problems such as facial gender classification. This is not to say that you won't be seeing any more new algorithms and functions in OpenCV. In fact, this chapter will introduce a whole bunch...