Abstract and Supplemental Materials

Scripting Programs with Lua. Talk given to the Yorktown High School Libre Users Group, Feburary 12, 2004.

Presentation: Full-color handouts (155K) - Black and white handouts (suitable for printing) (155K)

You know it's called a "research project" when you're supposed to recognize a human face from images, and figure out what it is doing. This involves a lot of number crunching, so you have to make it run fast. But at the same time you have no idea of where the project is ultimately going. Experiments with rapid changes of approach are part of your daily staple. Making it run fast is no problem, just use C or C++. But what is an experimenter to do if a small change results in an involuntary 30-minute coffee break while the C compiler rebuilds the program? Not good if you're suppposed to deliver results in 20 minutes from now.

In this talk, I will show how the Lua scripting language comes to the rescue of this face recognition research project. It allows you to glue C or C++ program parts together quickly, and painlessly. Changing behavior is just changing a script, with no lengthy compiler-enforced coffee breaks. What makes Lua really stand out from the rest of the pack, though, is that it is also ideally suited to describe data. This makes it very easy to define complex models of the human face.