# harthur/kittydar

Face detection for cats in JavaScript - demo for TXJS 2012 talk

Repository: https://github.com/harthur/kittydar
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/kittydar
Homepage: http://harthur.github.com/kittydar
Language: JavaScript
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Archived: true
Last push: 2019-11-02T20:44:00+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5218, "days_push": 2496, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1428, forks 155 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:42.093644+00:00)

## What it is
Kittydar is a JavaScript library that detects the locations of cat faces in images using Histogram of Oriented Gradients features fed into a pre-trained neural network. It works on canvas elements in the browser or via node-canvas in Node.js.

## Use cases
- find all cats in a photo and get their bounding boxes
- detect cat faces in images from the browser using canvas
- run cat detection server-side in node with node-canvas
- experiment with HOG features and neural networks for object detection
- add a fun cat-detection demo to a web page

## When to choose
- you need a lightweight, dependency-free JavaScript cat detector for a demo or toy project
- you want a simple, readable example of HOG + neural network object detection
- your images show upright, forward-facing cats and speed is not a concern

## When to avoid
- you need production-grade accuracy or speed - it is slow and misses or misclassifies cats
- you need detection of arbitrary objects or modern deep-learning-based detection
- you need an actively maintained library - the project is a 2012 talk demo with no ongoing development

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: abandoned
- function: computer-vision, image-processing, machine-learning
- domain: computer-vision, image-processing, machine-learning
- platform: browser
- tags: cat-detection, face-detection, hog-features, neural-network, canvas, demo-project, nodejs, javascript

## Member repositories
- harthur/kittydar (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:42.093644+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:37:19.188901+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/harthur/kittydar (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:42.093644+00:00, sha bfd959eed9f1)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.