Porting a Face Detector Written in C to WebAssembly

This article share the technique used by PixLab to port the real-time face detection runtime written in pure C of the SOD Computer Vision library to WebAssembly to achieve real-time face detection on the browser.

The final result including the WASM binary, face model and the exported Javascript interfaces are available to download here and ready to be integrated into existing projects in-need for real-time face detection in the browser.

The full article is available to consult here.

fd

OCR performance improved

As requested by our users, our /OCR endpoint gets more support for various languages including Arabic, Modern Hebrew, Russian & simplified Chinese.

bounding box coordinates are now enabled by default. For each request, besides the full text output, you get a bbox array where each entry of this array hold the target word and its bounding box (i.e. rectangle) coordinates. Each entry in this array is identified by an instance of the following JSON object:


{
    word: Extracted word,
    x: X coordinate of the top left corner,
    y: Y coordinate of the top left corner,
    w: Width of the rectangle that englobe this word,
    h: Height of the rectangle that englobe this word
}

The documentation is updated and available to consult at https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=ocr and a Python sample is provided on Github at https://github.com/symisc/pixlab/blob/master/python/ocr.py.

With that in hand, you can further tune your analysis phase for example by extracting each word via /crop and perform another pass if desired.