For their senior ECE 4760 project, engineering students [Brian Harding and cat Jubinski] put together a pretty outstanding portable face recognition system called FaceAccess. The system depends on the eigenface method to help distinguish one user from another, a process that the pair carried out using MatLab.

They say that the system only needs to be hooked up to a computer once, during the training period. It is during this period that faces are scanned and processed in MatLab to create the eigenface set, which is then uploaded to the scanner.

Once programmed, the scanner operates independently of the computer, powered by its own ATmega644 micro controller. users enroll their face by pressing one button on the system, storing their identity as a combination of eigenfaces in the onboard flash chip. once an individual has been enrolled, a second button can be pressed to acquire access to whatever resources the face recognition system is protecting.

The students say that their system is accurate 88% of the time, with zero false positives – that’s pretty outstanding considering the system’s portability and cost.

Stick around to see a quick demo video of their FaceAccess system in action.