In the "interesting uses of PHP" department today, Andrei Zmievski has this new post on his blog today about an integration of PHP and facial recognition technology.

Face recognition technology is getting really good. Yesterday I saw a link to Intel's OpenCV library float through the mailing list at work and a note that someone wrote a PHP extension for it. "Interesting", I thought. I hacked up a simple PHP script that would take an image and process it slightly to make detected regions more obvious. Here's an example of the output. Not bad, huh?

Then Jeremy tried another image, with some spooky results. Note that aside from the person, there are a couple more regions that the library thought was a face. If you look closer, the larger rectangle on the carpet encloses something that does have vague face-like features. Nice job, Intel.

I think Andrei is going to have to make this one public to appease the PHP masses - this is just too cool. I can't think of much in the way of usefulness right now, but it's still a pretty cool application of an interface with PHP...