Back in 1994, during my M.Sc. in Computer Science, my research topic for my thesis was exam timetabling. Initially, I explored various heuristic algorithms to address the graph colouring problem. However, as you add more complex constraints for optimisation, it became evident that traditional heuristics weren’t quite cutting it. This led me to a shift towards genetic algorithms. At that time, they stood out as the superior strategy for tackling such multifaceted optimization challenges, offering a more dynamic and effective solution.

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.