Deep learning facial recognition research project
First, tensorflow would be a great resource as it is gaining a userbase with exponential growth. Tensorflow has gpu support for single node calculations, and has recently added a distributed version for larger calculations.  There are some tutorials on convolution ANN, which will probably be the direction you will go with a computer vision problem. Also, some books are coming soon and some are in alpha.  But enough of plugging a particular library!


A perspective based facial recognition problem would be interesting if data were available e.g. with two perspectives on faces, do recognition on a third perspective.
A relative based facial recognition problem could be interesting, again, if data were available e.g. given two parents, try to find the child.  One could probably scrape facebook to get a reasonable data set for this one.
Blending and aging faces and controlling for sex (hair length, facial hair, etc) for problems where a kid has been abducted and you have parents pictures and sibling pictures and the child has grown up.
A simple aging recognition problem could be interesting... given baby pictures, can you recognize the adult or vice versa.


Just some thoughts, the possibilities are endless. I suggest starting with a very simple stub of a problem and then slowly adding sophistication.

Hope this helps!