For those who haven’t experienced it yet, the early days of parenthood are challenging to say the least. Trying to get something done with a raging case of sleep deprivation is hard enough, but the little bundle of joy that always seems to be in physical contact with you makes it nearly impossible to do things with your hands. What should the new parent do when it comes time to get a paid job?
Finding himself in such a boat, [Fletcher]The solution was to build a face-activated keyboard to meet the needs of his offspring. Before you ask, no, speech recognition software wouldn’t work, at least according to the sleepy owner protesting noisy awakenings. The solution was instead to try OpenCV and the facial recognition dlib library first [Fletcher] flashing morse code. While that more or less worked, your blinders can’t tolerate such a workout for long, so he moved on to a simpler series of gestures. Mouthing Morse code covers most of the keyboard, while a combination of eye, eyebrow, and other facial flicks and tics covers the rest, with MediaPipe’s Face Mesh doing the heavy lifting in terms of landmark recognition.
The resulting face keyboard, aptly named “CheekyKeys”, performed well enough for: [Fletcher] to use for a skills test during an interview with a Big Tech Company. Supposing the interviewer on the other end seeing him convulse through the interview was worth the price of admission, and we don’t even care if it was a joke. Video after the break.
CheekyKeys is pretty cool and does something with a webcam and Python that we thought would require a dedicated AI depth camera. But maybe the real hack here was how [Fletcher] taught himself Morse in fifteen minutes.
This post Twitch and blink your way by typing with this face keyboard
was original published at “https://hackaday.com/2022/04/09/twitch-and-blink-your-way-through-typing-with-this-facial-keyboard/”
