Earlier this week I spent a morning listening to Ron Evan’s introduction to computer vision with Go course through Safari. Following my belief that every course should should have at least one project, I hacked up an application to deface images and webcam streams with hats: Lotsohats.

The course walked through several GoCV example applications to apply filters to images and use deep-learning packages with pre-trained models for image classification. To me, it seemed like an obvious easy assignment was mimic a certain alcohol-advertising crowd-cam app used at the local hockey arena and drop hats on people in images.

It was my first experience with Go, but the proof of concept took a morning to hack something together, learning Go unit testing and exploring the GoCV and Standard Go Library APIs along the way, and this morning was spent polishing, tweaking, and documenting. The Donovan and Kernighan Go book is also a good resource.