Detect faces from "Where's Waldo" picture using OpenCV

Question

I want to detect all faces from an "Where's Waldo" image just like in this video (at 23 seconds), using OpenCV. I already tried using all the haar classifiers OpenCV provides, but I don't get any results. Probably because the classifiers are specified for human faces, not cartoon faces. Is the only solution for this to create a new haar classifier or are there other ways?

Answer 1

The haar cascade your using is for (any) face detection. As Klaus mentioned, that is not the same as face recognition.

If you want, you can train your own haar cascade but it might be overkill for what you're trying to achieve. I'd suggest going for template matching

In fact, doing a quick search I easily found this article: Using OpenCV, Python and Template Matching to play “Where’s Waldo?”

Here's another article that using TensorFlow: How to Find Wally with a Neural Network

I recommending starting simple with opencv matchTemplate first.