I'm following up on this stack overflow discussion as well as a discussion on github.
Thanks to berak I got everything working and can now use the the FaceRecognizers within a java app. I still wanted to follow up on the question whether the FaceRecognizers (and especially the new pointers implementation) will make it into the java bindings for 3.0? I'm happy to use the current version from the repository if there is already a better support.
Besides - how does the confidence value of the LBPHFaceRecognizer work? When I use an image from the training set I get a confidence value of 0, if I use another image I get a confidence value in the hundreds. Does that mean that a lower value is better?