An alternative to developing new technology is to apply existing technology in a new way. I was thinking about face recognition software a few days ago, and thought of a fun application (this isn't a serious project at all, by the way).
So I quickly wrote AutoShoop, that uses an existing face-detection algorithm, but draws "shoop da woop" shapes on people's faces. In other words, it automatically turns this:
into this:
No Photoshop needed!Another feature: introducing people...
...to Sparta!
I could have spent some time making the results better, but that's not really the point. It's more of a proof of concept.
autoshoopsrc.zip (C# source)
I didn't write any of the face-detection part; I simply used fdlib to find the location and size of the face. Your results may vary; I found that for some reason fdlib sometimes has a hard time finding faces in certain photos. When it works, though, it works pretty well.