Introduction JavaCV is a Java wrapper to a number of computer vision libraries including OpenCV, OpenKinect and others. In this article we’ll look at using JavaCV with OpenCV to do real-time face and hand detection on a video stream. Face detection (as opposed to face recognition) has become mainstream with everything from Facebook to low-budget digital cameras supporting it. Hand detection and gesture recognition is somewhat less mature and I was hard pressed to find good open source implementations of this.

I have debt: a mortgage on my home and some credit card debt. Is debt a “bad thing”? Well, yes. In the sense that I would much rather not have to pay off my mortgage every month. If I didn’t have a mortgage I’d have an extra bit of cash left every month that I can do far better things with. But was my mortgage useful to me? Hell, yeah! Without it, I probably wouldn’t own my own home now and if I rented something comparable, the rent would in all likelihood be more than what it costs me to service my mortgage at the moment.

I have high hopes for this blog. It was a new year’s resolution to become a more active blogger than my previous attempt as can be seen at elroyparkinson.blogspot.com. I still plan to keep that going for non-software related blogs if the urge strikes me once a year or so as has been the case historically. Software Pendula will however focus exclusively on software development and architecture and I plan to blog at least once every couple of months here.