Poco F1 Front Face Recognition IR Camera Integration

[Rishi Bhattacharya]

I'd like to request a feature addition to your application.
So I own a phone called the POCO F1 which has facial recognition built into it. The facial recognition software utilizes an IR Front Camera with f/2.0 Aperture. I'd like to request output from this IR camera onto PC through USB so that I can use eye and face tracking on my PC. I know this is possible because an app like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaolvcm.pocoseccamera&hl=en_IN&gl=US this exists.
If you'd like any help with testing on this phone or require checking the specifications/hardware I'd be glad to help out.

[Wim Vriend]

Hello Rishi,

Good ideas are always welcome!

When I hear "IR-camera", I immediately think of IR-tracking instead of face-tracking. The problem is, that there are very few smartphones which support an IR camera at this time?

I also read in the description that you must root your device to make it work. That does not seem very user-friendly to me...

[Rishi Bhattacharya]

Ah, my apologies. I meant to say face tracking through IR Clip tracking. That's why I posted this in PointTracker. And in regard to very few smartphones, that is still a problem unfortunately.

Only Iphones with their true depth camera support facetracking while Androids phones which rely on IR Camera Face-Recogniton. Namely Pixel 4, Poco F1, OnePluses with their rear IR colorfilter cameras, Oppo Find X, Mi 8 and Huawei Mate 20 Pros so the feature implementation audience is pretty bleak.

But on the subject of Poco F1, the description says if you don't have a version of MIUI higher than 10, you can't use it without the root. I own a Poco F1 and the latest version right now is MIUI 12, released in October last year. The app works fine for me without any sort of special modification to the operating system, even permitting the recording of videos in the app.

And since this will be the last MIUI update to this phone it won't be outdated anytime soon or require any maintenance of code later at least, so there's a small silver lining. I'd say just because of the sheer volumes of POCO F1s out there (about 700,000 units sold), it would still go a long way even if a 100 people utilize this feature.

Again, thanks for the reply and consideration

[Wim Vriend]

Aha, I had not noticed that this was posted in the PointTracker section :). Very good!

To add the PointTracker logic to an App would be a challenge for me. On the other hand, it might be easier to send the camera feed to the PC and then let PointTracker analyze that video stream?

If you can find an App that enables you to use the phone as a webcam, you would be closer to a solution...

[Rishi Bhattacharya]

IP webcam was one of the alternatives to this, but the dev is.... Unwilling to write special code to interface with the IR camera. Xiamoi of course pulled support from this phone so the prospect of them adding an IR camera to the Android Camera API is rather bleak. I mean I'm sure the facepose app would have a better time working with an IR camera rather than a normal camera , but of course this means like completely new code to track one's face. I'll look for a PS3 camera, they're rather scarce in India so I woulda preferred this option. Thank you for the assistance though. I appreciate the help.