Hello Webcam!

So i figured i’d drop a quick update on what i’ve been messing around with, firstly ZACon II was awesome! I’m really dissapointed i didn’t submit a better talk and get a chance again, however i did win the badge competition and get to make my own cool badge:

Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock!

Some of the talks i really liked:

• Who can forget Roelof Temminghs talk, especially when one of the sections is “5 things Andrew didn’t implement in his free time” :P
• Ollie Whitehouse on UNCON and how their group runs ( and drinks :P )
• RC1140/Jameel‘s talk on Powershell
• Todor/UKJ‘s talk on DNSSEC ( but really guys 800 requests at once, that needs to be fixed/mitigated first!)
• Ross Simpsons iPhone Hackery ( can’t wait for 4.1 JB to be out )
• Ian de Villiers JAR reversing talk
• Haroon Meer‘s FIG talk :)

Secondly i KNOW i probably should have put up code and stuff for the arduino project i built, basically its a webapp that shows the webcam and allows you to move the cam around. The Arduino is connected to two servo’s to do vertical / horizontal movement, and it can be controlled via the webapp:

CAM CAM CAM

Oh yeah, it also lets you send text to an LCD and blink an LED ( but these aren’t nearly as cool ).

So after doing this i wanted to look at motion tracking and see if i could get the camera to automagically follow someone around a room with facial/object recognition, and in the little time i have had to play today it seems easily doable with the likes of OpenCV , so far today ( besides battling c++ – its been over 5 years since I’ve touched the stuff, so there were some issues :P ) I’ve managed to get it to do some pretty cool facial recognition with the Haar classification and the provided definition – haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml. I’ve also given it a bit of a window to try move into and it seems to work pretty well. The only issue i saw was that at the default resolution of the camera ( 640×480) it absolutely ATE my 3ghz dual core, so i had to halve the image size and now it works real-time-ish, check out the pic:

Webcam Facial Detection

I’ve also been playing around with Facebook’s graphAPI and i am hoping to provide some cool new search functionality both to Maltego and as an RSS feed that people can use to monitor what has been said about a specific topic in the public on the social networking giant.

I’ll try start putting out a little more.

Cheers,
Andrew

p.s. yeah, the mohawks been gone for a month now, now if only i had a new alias that wasn’t taken on the net :)