IR Facial Recognition Interface
Senior capstone project and my first real introduction to seeing frontend, backend, and UX/UI design come together. Built as part of a team during the final year of my Computer Engineering degree, this project sparked a genuine passion for full stack development.
This was my senior capstone project, and it holds a special place in my engineering story. It was the first project where I could see every layer of a system, the frontend, backend, and computer vision pipeline, working together as a cohesive whole. Watching something I helped build respond intelligently to a live IR camera feed made everything click.
What It Does
The system uses an infrared camera to capture facial data, processes it through an OpenCV-based recognition pipeline, and displays the results through a web interface. The backend handled the recognition logic while the frontend rendered identification results in real time.
Open Source Foundation
The backend recognition pipeline was built on top of open source facial recognition libraries, which the team adapted for IR input. MediaPipe was evaluated during the research and testing phases as a candidate framework for the facial landmark and detection pipeline before the team settled on the final approach. The frontend and interface layer was built from scratch around our specific use case, designing the display and interaction model to fit the actual workflow of the system.
What I Took Away
This project showed me how much I love the UX/UI side of engineering, not just making something functional, but making it intuitive and responsive. That realization is what set me on the path toward frontend and full stack development.