Cogito — v0 [Idea and Printing]

I was looking trough https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ (A set of human face generated with GAN algorithms, these photo-realistic image are made by the algorithm) and I was thinking, Is it possible to find your doppelgänger inside this generation ?

I began to scrape these image, until I got around 1k images.

If you find yourself in these image ? do you really exist ? Are you really that “special” ? It’s pretty intriguing

In order to compare your face and other’s faces : there are several algorithms. I used the open source face_recognition using deep learning.

Here is the core algorithm’s logic :

It scrape your face from the webcam and abstract it then compare it to other faces.

It was going to calculate the components at each iteration over a face which took lot of time. So in order to make it more efficient another algorithm precalculate all the abstraction from the dataset of faces and save it into a database. I had some issues there due to the use of Numpy Array (from a library) to the saving into the database in json with an array list in JS style.

I was thinking about a way of showing these result. It first show the path to the image in the terminal; not very clever. Then the similar face where shown as pop up into the OS.

After some reflexion, I thought that using a printer, more over a thermal printer, like in a supermarket, would be the most cool way of showing it.

Because, it would be reactive, It would allow user to grab their image, and it follow the printing logic brought by programming ( writing something on the terminal is call printing)

So I get helped by Alice Ricci, that worked on these kind of printing devices last year. In order to print using these device, you need to “create a printer” from a raspberry pi (a Micro computer on Linux)