OpenFace can optionally use a CUDA-enabled GPU, but it's not a requirement. The performance is almost real-time on a CPU. After detection (which varies depending on the input image size), the recognition takes less than a second. We have a few performance results on the FAQ at
http://cmusatyalab.github.io/openface/faq/I'm surprised (and skeptical) uWho can do detection+recognition at 15fps.
I would expect face detection alone in 1280x720 images to be much slower than 15fps. On my 3.7GHz CPU with a 1050x1400px image, dlib's face detector takes about a second to run. This is also my experience with OpenCV's face detector, which I noticed your code is using. Also OpenCV's face detector returns many false positives, especially in videos. See this YouTube video for an experimental comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsK0hzcEyHI
Also, I think it's a strong claim that faces can't be generated from a perceptual hash. One property of perceptual hashes is that hashes that have a close hamming distance to each other are more similar (of the same person). I wouldn't be surprised if a model could successfully map perceptual hashes to faces given enough training data. I read a good paper about doing this (not specific to faces) but can't remember the reference now.
Edit: I just added some simple timing code to this sample OpenCV face detection project on my 3.60GHz machine: https://github.com/shantnu/FaceDetect
On the John Lennon image from the OpenFace FAQ sized 1050x1400px, it takes 0.32 seconds, which is about 3fps. This is slightly quicker that dlib's detector on the same image, but it also returned a false positive.
I'm surprised (and skeptical) uWho can do detection+recognition at 15fps. I would expect face detection alone in 1280x720 images to be much slower than 15fps. On my 3.7GHz CPU with a 1050x1400px image, dlib's face detector takes about a second to run. This is also my experience with OpenCV's face detector, which I noticed your code is using. Also OpenCV's face detector returns many false positives, especially in videos. See this YouTube video for an experimental comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsK0hzcEyHI
Also, I think it's a strong claim that faces can't be generated from a perceptual hash. One property of perceptual hashes is that hashes that have a close hamming distance to each other are more similar (of the same person). I wouldn't be surprised if a model could successfully map perceptual hashes to faces given enough training data. I read a good paper about doing this (not specific to faces) but can't remember the reference now.
Edit: I just added some simple timing code to this sample OpenCV face detection project on my 3.60GHz machine: https://github.com/shantnu/FaceDetect On the John Lennon image from the OpenFace FAQ sized 1050x1400px, it takes 0.32 seconds, which is about 3fps. This is slightly quicker that dlib's detector on the same image, but it also returned a false positive.