wtf is kittydar?

Kittydar is a face detection tool for cats. You give it an image, and it tells you how many cats are in that image and where each cat's head is located, returning coordinates for a rectangle around each one. It was originally built as a demo for a JavaScript conference talk. To use it, you pass in a canvas element (a standard way to represent images in JavaScript, whether in a browser or on a server using Node.js). Under the hood, the tool scans the image by breaking it into small windows and analyzing each one. For each window, it calculates patterns in how light and dark areas transition, essentially capturing the shape and texture of what's depicted. Those patterns get fed into a neural network that was pre-trained on thousands of cat photos and non-cat photos, which then scores each window on how likely it is to contain a cat head. This would appeal to anyone building pet-related apps, photo organizers, or novelty projects who wants to automatically identify cats in user-uploaded photos. The README doesn't go into detail on specific production use cases, but the core use is straightforward: detecting cats in images using JavaScript rather than relying on a specialized computer vision service. The project is honest about its tradeoffs. It works best with cats that are upright and facing forward, though it can handle slight head tilts. It also misses cats sometimes and occasionally flags non-cats as cats. Processing a single image takes a few seconds, so it's not built for real-time applications. The neural network's training data and scripts are included in the repository for anyone who wants to improve the model.