Facetracker Update
Table of contents
We have given our popular OpenSeeFace wrapper application, Facetracker, a few updates. Even though it may not sound like much, it turned out to be more work than expected. Here is what changed in version 26.8 and 26.8.1.
Saving and Loading Settings
First of all, Facetracker now finally remembers the settings you have configured. This means you no longer have to reselect your webcam or tracking model every time. Your server settings no longer need to be reconfigured either, Facetracker now saves and restores them automatically.
Since Facetracker is a GTK4/Adwaita application, this is handled quite elegantly through the built-in GSettings system. A big thank-you to the GNOME developers for this elegant solution, which takes care of saving and loading settings largely automatically.
Support for aarch64
In earlier versions of Facetracker, we shipped OpenSeeFace as a pre-built binary package. While this made publishing the app as a Flatpak on Flathub easier, it also came with its own set of limitations. For one, our pre-built package only supported desktop processors (x86_64), making it unusable on aarch64 devices such as smartphones or a Raspberry Pi.
We have therefore not only removed the dependency on our pre-built package, but now build OpenSeeFace from source for all architectures supported by Flathub. Tested on a Raspberry Pi 400.
One possible use case is now running Facetracker on a Linux phone such as a Librem 5 or a PinePhone and using the device's camera for face tracking. The tracking data can then be sent to your PC, where a VTuber application such as VTube Studio is running.
In our tests, a Raspberry Pi 400 achieved approximately 7 frames per second in face detection at a video resolution of 640 × 480 pixels and 30 frames per second input.
Closing Thoughts
Listed like this, these improvements may not sound like much, but they are nonetheless significant for the future of Facetracker. A redesign of the user interface is also planned for future versions.
Facetracker can be installed directly from Flathub on any Linux distribution.
