Face Detection

Desktop application for real-time face detection on a webcam stream, built with Electron, Svelte 5, Rust and OpenCV.

The renderer captures RGBA frames from the camera, sends them to the main process via IPC, where a Rust native module (NAPI-RS) runs Haar cascade face detection with OpenCV and draws bounding boxes. Processed frames are rendered back on a canvas. Video recording to WebM is also supported.

Prerequisites

• Node.js >= 20
• Rust stable toolchain
• OpenCV 4 development libraries
• libclang (required by the opencv Rust crate)

macOS

brew install opencv llvm pkg-config

Ubuntu / Debian

sudo apt-get install -y libopencv-dev libclang-dev pkg-config

Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/sshaplygin/face-detection.git
cd face-detection
npm install
npm run dev

Scripts

Script	Description
npm run dev	Build native module (debug) and start electron-vite dev server
npm run build	Build native module (release) and bundle the Electron app
npm run pack	Build and package into a directory (no installer)
npm run dist	Build and create a distributable installer
npm run build:native	Build the Rust native module (debug)
npm run build:native:release	Build the Rust native module (release, with LTO)
npm run typecheck	Run svelte-check TypeScript validation

Architecture

src/
  main/index.ts        # Electron main process — loads native .node binary, handles IPC
  preload/index.ts      # Context bridge between main and renderer
  renderer/
    App.svelte          # Svelte 5 UI — camera control, frame loop, recording
    main.ts             # Renderer entry point
native/
  src/lib.rs            # Rust NAPI module — Haar cascade face detection via OpenCV
  Cargo.toml            # Rust dependencies (opencv, napi, once_cell)
  data/                 # Haar cascade XML classifier

CI

GitHub Actions runs on every push/PR to master:

• Frontend — npm ci + npm run typecheck
• Rust — cargo fmt --check, cargo clippy -- -D warnings, cargo build, cargo test

Tech Stack

• Electron 34 — desktop shell
• Svelte 5 — renderer UI
• electron-vite — build tooling
• NAPI-RS — Rust ↔ Node.js bridge
• OpenCV (Rust bindings) — face detection with Haar cascades

License

MIT — Sam Shaplygin