[Shotwell] Adding face recognition to shotwell

[Narendra Acharya <narendra_m_a yahoo com>]

Hi,

As mentioned in my recent posts, I am working on better integration of face detection (via DBus) and add face recognition as the next step. The DBus connection cleanup is mostly done in my fork: https://gitlab.gnome.org/nma83/shotwell/commits/wip/faces.

In order to get to face recognition, I would like to use the OpenFace method described here: https://cmusatyalab.github.io/openface/

It involves running the extracted face image (already available from detection) through a DNN to get a 128 element vector which supposedly represents the face. This vector needs to be stored (say in FaceTable) per face. Face recognition can be performed by transforming the face to be recognized to a similar vector and correlating via dot-product with each stored face's vector. The one with the highest dot product is the most likely match.

To do this, a DNN model is needed which is open-source under Apache 2.0. 

https://storage.cmusatyalab.org/openface-models/nn4.small2.v1.t7 - 31MB size

How could we add this model as part of the shotwell package? Or create another package which can be an optional dependency.

Thanks,

Narendra