This takes a little bit of code to explain but I posted the code in gist and notated it thoroughly

first ..I'm writing a lisp wrapper for OpenCV c++ interface and my lisp code wraps around c wrappers for the c++ so in my code used for testing there will be my c wrappers and c++ OpenCV code intermixed. Here is an example of what I can do in C https://gist.github.com/W-Net-AI/11205899 that I can't in Lisp, the Lisp code is here https://gist.github.com/W-Net-AI/11205892  The question I'm asking hinges on the output of the detectMultiScale c wrapper for the c++ OpenCV function detectMultiScale here: http://docs.opencv.org/modules/objdetect/doc/cascade_classification.html?highlight=detectmultiscale#cascadeclassifier-detectmultiscale that's why my code examples  are long because it takes a few lines to set up being able to use detectMultiScale. Pls let me know and I can supply more info/ such as my wrappers etc.