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Derek Andre

I am a software developer, based out of the Kansas City area. I love mobile application development and machine learning. My claim to fame is that I own a Windows 7: Steve Ballmer Special Edition disc. It is actually a portkey that will take me directly to Steve at any time. Rock!

How to Create a Dystopian Future at Home with Python, OpenCV, and Microsoft Azure

Derek Andre Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies, Python, Tutorial 2 Comments

Facial recognition is both amazing and horrifying. Some amazing things it can do is the ability to find missing children or seniors, using your face to unlock your phone, and being able to board an airplane faster.

In this blog post, I want to highlight some powerful tools and platforms that allow you to create distributed facial recognition systems with OpenCV and Azureā€™s Cognitive Services. By the end of this post, you will have a working face detector using OpenCV that can communicate with Azureā€™s Cognitive Services.

I used Python 3.7.4 and pip 19.2.3 for this project. You can view the code from this blog at https://github.com/dcandre/Dystopian-Future-At-Home.

Tastes Like Burning: An Example of ARKit and iOS Particle Systems

Derek Andre Development Technologies, Mobile Leave a Comment

We have reached a peak in computer science: I can make fire come out of my face. Apple has made it simple with an iPhone X to track a userā€™s face and use a particle systems file to add special effects.

In this post, I will demonstrate how to ā€œbreathe fireā€ using Xcode 9.4.1, Swift 4.1.2, and iOS 11.4.1 on my iPhone X. For this tutorial, you will need a physical device with a TrueDepth camera. The completed project is available on GitHub.

File -> New -> Project
A lot of iOS tutorials start off with creating a Single View Application. That can get boring. Luckily in this article….

Core ML

Core ML After Dark

Derek Andre Development Technologies, Machine Learning, Mobile, Tutorial Leave a Comment

So you’ve made this great social media app, and you are about to sit back and wait for the money to roll in. But, there is a problem: people keep trying to upload nude photos to it.

What if we could have a trained machine learning model that could detect not safe for work (NSFW) content and do it on a iOS device, before any image would be uploaded to a server?

Developing this trained machine learning model is way out of scope for this blog post. Luckily, the good people at Yahoo have already done this with theirĀ open-sourced trained Caffe models. The question now is, how can we use this on an iOS device?

In this post: The sultry side of your iPhone can collide with acceptable use policies. We introduce a machine learning solution that can help your application decide what is truly too hot for the internet using Core ML on iOS…

In Your Face! Figuring Out Apple’s Face Detection API

Derek Andre Development Technologies, Mobile, Tutorial 3 Comments

Attention: The following article was published over 7 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.I am making a native iOS app that has face detection. Apple has an awesome image detection API that can find faces, barcodes, and even rectangular shapes in images or video frames. …