The Machine

A Python program designed to emulate The Machine from Person of Interest.

A slightly updated version of this program can be found at The Machine Rebooted. Contributions and improvements welcome.

What does it do?

It simulates the visual interface of The Machine. To accomplish this it uses OpenCV for face recognition and accepts voice commands, with randomly selected voices used in its responses. (Amazon Ivona, the source of the voices, was discontinued earlier this year, meaning that unfortunately the voice mode no longer works. It would unfortunately be too much work for me to fix it at this point so it will stay broken unless someone else wants to fix it or I get the spare time and enough people care about it)

Installation

The easy way

1. Install WinPython (must be Python 2.7)
2. Run pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Install AVbin (for voice command mode, not required if you don't activate voice mode) (No longer required as voices don't work)
4. You're done :)

The manual way

Install everything manually (see Dependencies below)

Detailed info

Reddit

Join the discussion on this thread on /r/PersonOfInterest

Face training

To train it to recognize your face, place photos of your face into "/facebase/1/", following the naming scheme "facebase/subjectnumber/subjectsubjectnumber.(1).jpg" (e.g. "facebase/1/subject01.(1).jpg"). Next you will need to update the subjects.csv file (see more details in the 'designations' section) to add the user to the system, this will only need to be done manually on the first run, after that you can change designations and add users using commands in the program. Now run the program and choose to "(r)etrain".

Once some photos are trained you can add more using the program. Once your face is visible in the frame simply type "train as yourname" into the console. The program will then proceed to take 10 still images of your face. It can be slightly buggy at this stage so if the webcam window appears frozen simply hit enter in the console, this should allow the code to progress as normal.

Once the recognizer has been trained you can select "(l)oad" at startup. You only need to retrain if you add photos to the database

Designations

The program stores user info (asset number, name and designation) in the subjects.csv file, which can be edited in any spreadsheet program (or notepad, but the formatting is a little harder to understand). The designations are: ADMIN, ANALOG, USER (my current term for indigo), THREAT and UNKNOWN (my stand in for "irrelevant").

When editing this file you must leave the first row as is (with the headings) and start your subjects from the second row onwards (so subject 1's info would be on row 2), you also cannot leave blank rows between subjects.

If you are an ADMIN or ANALOG you can also change a subject's designation using the command "set name as designation". For example if I was to type "set finch as admin", the program would find the subject with the name finch and set them as an admin.

Info

Typing the command "info" into the console (you must be an ADMIN or ANALOG to use this command) will bring up an information box on the camera stream, similar to the one in the last season.

Typing the command "status" into the console (you must be an ADMIN or ANALOG to use this command) will bring up a status box containing the program uptime and number of subjects detected.

##### Voice If you are an ANALOG interface or an ADMIN you can type "voice" into the console, this activates the voice command mode, this essentially allows you to use any other command via speech recognition. To go back to typing simply give the command "voice" again.

The voice commands and responses do require an internet connection, however, the program runs fine without voice mode. The program saves mp3 files of each individual word it says, meaning each only needs to be downloaded once (however you may not like how the random voice says that word, deleting the mp3 will result in the voice being randomized for that word again).

Exit

To exit the program simply type (or say, if you are in voice mode) "exit".

Troubleshooting

• If you get this error:

  error: (-215) scn == 3 || scn == 4 in functioncv::ipp_cvtColor

  Try increasing your webcam number until it works.
   

• If you get this error:

  You'll need more than one sample to learn a model

  Try to create a folder named "1" in the "facebase" folder and place some photos (in the "facebase\1" folder)
   

• If you encounter any problems not listed here, just open an issue.

Dependencies

Python 2.7 (64 bit) is required.

#### Speech

| Package/module | pip command | | --------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | | pyglet (requires AVbin) | pip install pyglet | | speech_recognition | pip install SpeechRecognition | | natural.text | pip install natural | | Pyvona | pip install pyvona | | num2words | pip install num2words |

Face Recognition

You also have to install OpenCV. You can do one of the following:
1. Copy cv2.pyd (get it from here) to PYTHON_INSTALLATION\Lib\site-packages (more info)

2. Build OpenCV with extra modules yourself (more info)