All Hail Zdenek Kalal

Here’s a truly great example of the power of Open Source and something which we think will gather steam in our own OpenSplash initiative over the coming months.

Initially reported over on Wired, CNET, Techland ^[1] and others, young PhD student Zdenek Kalal has invented code that not only recognises faces but can also track them as they move around.

Not impressed yet? Well it’s not just faces. Almost any object you define on screen can be monitored, tracked, and memorised for future use.

Still not impressed? Well the system that he calls Predator – basically object tracking video software has just been released to the world under an open source license.

Techland summed it up nicely “Predator can be shown any object – face and fingertips, yes, but also pretty much anything you can imagine – and then track it in a video stream”.

“It learns as it tracks. It watches for movements in the object, and works out what it looks like from various angles and in different lighting conditions. It’s astonishing stuff”.

Not surprisingly since announcing this to the world, he’s been inundated with hundreds of emails from people wanting to put his technology to use and so he released version 1.0 of his software under the GPL open source licence.

It’s revolutionary and it’s now open source. Truly fantastic.