EasyFacesBot

Inspiration

Stickers are becoming increasingly popular for use in messaging apps such as Telegram, but creating custom stickers may be a daunting task for beginners with no experience in sticker formatting. In particular, creating stickers of faces such as family and friends can be a hassle. EasyFacesBot bridges the difficulty gap and provides an easy way for users to create stickers of their family and friends.

What it does

EasyFacesBot detects faces from pictures in .jpg and .png formats, and sends them as Telegram Stickers. You can either create a sticker pack or add to an existing sticker pack.

How we built it

We used Python's telegram bot APIs for communication and sticker generation, and OpenCV for face detection to build EasyFacesBot.

Challenges we ran into

Notable challenges included:

Detecting faces in difficult photo scenarios (poor lighting, face partially blocked)
Converting .jpg to .png without saving into the user's storage
Ensuring protected ownership of sticker packs to prevent unwanted additions from others

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Within 24 hours, we:

Created our first Telegram Bot and familiarised ourselves with Telegram Bot APIs
Made good use of existing solutions and libraries (OpenCV) to create something new and more useful

What we learned

Though simple to deploy, Telegram Bots have the potential for advanced functionality
The differences between polling and webhooks
How Telegram servers operate to accommodate Bots and photos sent to the server
How message handlers and callback query handlers operate