Hawk: Image recognition application using Rust and AWS services

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Introduction

Triggering the AWS Lambda function was tricky so we decided to work it through AWS API Gateway service. The Rust code hits the API Gateway and it further triggers the Lambda function.

About Hawk

Hawk is a security system in Rust that uses AWS services like S3, Rekognition, Lambda, etc to get the similarity score of two images sent through the Rust application. This application hits the API Gateway that invokes the AWS lambda function. The Lambda function then interacts with the AWS Rekognition with the help of the CompareFaces API and responds with a similarity score between the two images i.e the one clicked from the Raspberry Pi camera and the one being the reference image for the user stored in an S3 bucket. The similarity score will decide if the person entering the premises is the one whose RFID card is being scanned or not. If not the image stored in the S3 bucket would help us identify who was using the RFID card illegitimately. Kafka configured Rust code enables us to use the application as a simulator for the real scenario.

Challenges

The major problems which we faced were as follows:

Solution

Triggering the AWS Lambda function was tricky so we decided to work it through AWS API Gateway service. The Rust code hits the API Gateway and it further triggers the Lambda function. We resolved Hawk asynchronous problem by taking the reference from Tokio doc which itself was built on rust futures crate. We fixed the cross-compilation issue by ignoring the default features of Kafka by setting [default_features=false]. We used OpenSSL version 0.10 with feature [vendored].