Building a linux operating system for a single board computer and implementing a real-time application

The main goal of this study was to build a special Operating System for a Single Board Computer. Application of a Linux-based Operating System was decided and Debian GNU/Linux which is installed on a personal computer was used. After porting of the operating system to a Single Board Computer, a new embedded system was created by plugging a USB webcam into the board for image processing purposes. A real-time frontal face detection and tracking application was implemented to work on this new embedded system. A three phase object detection algorithm was used as the face detection method in this work. After detecting the face, the detected face was tracked by using an adaptive object tracking algorithm that was coded in C programming language. Performance issues and problems encountered in the application process are presented.