There has been a lot of buzz around Face Recognition since Google Glass was announced. We believe that face recognition will open up a ton of possibilities in how we interact not just with each other, but with objects as well - whether it’s with Glass or not.
To help you in your journey of exploring face recognition, we have below a long list of face detection and recognition APIs that you can use for your applications. Enjoy!
- Face Recognition - Stephen here from Lambda Labs. For sample code and a graphical demo, check out http://api.lambdal.com/docs. Our API provides face recognition, facial detection, eye position, nose position, mouth position, and gender classification. If you have any questions ask! Just send an email to [email protected]. Happy Hacking! -Stephen
- Face (Detection) - A computer vision api for facial recognition and facial detection that is a perfect face.com replacement. We currently have a free api for face detection.
- Animetrics Face Recognition - The Animetrics Face Recognition API can be used to detect human faces in pictures. Information on facial features or “landmarks” is returned as coordinates on the image.. Animetrics Face Recognition will also detect and return the orientation, or “pose” of faces along 3 axes.
- Skybiometry Face Detection and Recognition - An easy to use Face Detection and Recognition API. You must have an application created in your account at SkyBiometry to use it (sign up at if you don’t have account yet).
- ImageVision Face Detection - Beta Release A better Face detection service! ImageVision is a computer vision company improving technology that determines the locations and sizes of human faces in arbitrary (digital) images.
- Face and scene recognition by Rekognition.com - Face.com alternative! Our fast, robust and scalable rekognition engine can do facial detection, crawling, recognition, scene understanding! It can be automatically trained using images and tags on Facebook!
- FaceRect - FaceRect is a powerful and free API for face detection. It finds faces (both frontal and profile) on the image specified by URL or uploaded as a file and is able to find multiple faces on a single photo, producing JSON output with a bounding box for each face found.
- Infatics Face Detection - Simple face detection API
- OpenCV Face Recognizer - OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library: http://opencv.org) is an open-source BSD-licensed library that includes several hundreds of computer vision algorithms.
- Libface - Libface is a library aimed at bringing face recognition technology to the open source community. It is written in C++ and maintained on Sourceforge. The library uses OpenCV 2.0 and aims to be a middleware for developers that don’t have to include any OpenCV code in order to use face recognition and face detection detection.
- Automatic naming of characters in video - The objective of this work is to label television or movie footage with the names of the people present in each frame of the video.
- CCV - a modern computer vision library
- OpenBR - Open Source Biometric Recognition
- Flandmark - open source implementation of facial landmark detector
- Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT) - an end-to-end system for fully automated facial expression recognition that operates in real-time.
- Nviso 3D facial imaging technology - Analyze human emotions from facial expressions. More direct and automatic than by any other method.
- FaceReader - FaceReader is the world’s first tool that is capable of automatically analyzing facial expressions, providing users with an objective assessment of a person’s emotion.
- Affdex - Affdex reads emotional states such as liking and attention from facial expressions using a webcam… to give marketers faster, more accurate insight into consumer response to brands and media.
- Faceware - Analyzer takes in a video of an actor’s facial performance and produces an .IMPD file for use in Retargeter™. It accomplishes this through the combination of simple user input on the front end, and complex computer vision algorithms on the back end.
- Face detection in iOS
- Face-Recognition-SDK - add face recognition to your apps
- Oddcast face detection API - The Face Tracking API allows Flash developers to harness advanced technology previously available only in high end video games.
- BioID - world’s first webcam-based personal recognition
- Betaface API - face detection and recognition
- Discrete Area Filters Face Detector - detect 15 face points, 4 face parts, multiple face, occluded faces
- Face detection using Support Vector Machine - this program is the clone of ‘Face Detection System’ in MATLAB but instead of Neural Networks, it is based on SVM.
- fdlib - is a face detection library for C/C++ and Matlab. It allows you to detect frontal faces in images.
- Visage - a human computer interface that aims to replace the traditional mouse with the face. Using a webcam and Visage the movement of the face becomes the movement of the mouse pointer. Left/right Eye blinks fire left/right mouse click events.
- Face tracking Project (Carnegie Mellon) - the Advanced Multiple Processing (AMP) offers face tracking using color matching combined with deformable templates. Both DLL for Windows and static library for Linux
- Real-time face detection program - Demo from the Fraunhofer institute IIS, Germany. Shows face tracking and detection using edge orientation matching.
- Evaluation of Face Recognition Algorithms - Resource for all researchers developing face recognition algorithms from Colorado State University. It provides a standard set of well known algorithms and established experimental protocols.
- Computer Vision Source Code - useful collection of image processing code
- Acsys biometrics SDK - allows third-party developers to implement advanced facial biometric technology with their own security applications
- Cognitec SDK - develops market-leading face recognition technologies and applications for enterprise and government customers around the world.
- KeyLemonFaceSDK - integrates recognition technology into major operating systems.
- FaceIT SDK -
- FaceSDK - FaceSDK enables Microsoft Visual C++, C#, VB, Java, and Delphi developers to build 32-bit and 64-bit applications for Web, Windows, Linux, and MacOS X with face recognition and face-based biometric identification functionality
- Verilook SDK - allows rapid development of biometric applications using functions from the VeriLook algorithm that ensure fast and reliable face identification.
- Beyond Reality Face SDK - calculates the position and 3D angles of a face in a single picture of a webcam stream. This information can be used to place 3D objects onto the image or to control an app via head movements
- Sightcorp - cutting edge face analysis technologies, targeting individual or crowd analysis
- Visage FaceDetect SDK - contains powerful techniques to find faces and facial features in still images in form of a well-documented C++ Software Development Kit
- Microsoft Research Face SDK Beta - integrates the latest face technologies from Microsoft research teams.
- How To: Kinect for Windows SDK Face Recognition
- Bayometric FaceIt Face Recognition SDK - combines traditional facial geometry techniques with skin biometrics
- FacePhi FaceRecognition SDK - consists of a set of libraries developerd for .NET and Silverlight
- 360Biometrics Face SDK - highly advanced face recognition system that is designed to work with the embedded or linked face images in your existing database.
- Hunter TrueID - web-enabled face recognition
- IMRSV - a real world, real time perceptive computing software that measures gender, age, attention time, dwell, glances and more for up to 25 people, 25 ft away using a basic webcam. It has a REST API as well.
- Bob - Bob is a signal-processing and machine learning toolbox originally developed by the Biometrics Group at Idiap, in Switzerland. Bob is primarily developed through GitHub.
- KeyLemon - KeyLemon provides a new way to access your computer. Instead of typing your password, you just need to smile to the webcam and KeyLemon will recognize you
- Flash AS3 face detection and recognition library - Oskar Wicha’s ActionScript 3 library allow us to do both things using Eigenfaces concept, basically some patterns which should match a human face.
- Stupeflix - Return an array of positions of detected faces, with type and confidence.
Anything missing on this list? Tell [email protected] and he’ll add it here ;)
You should also check out our other useful API lists for machine learning, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, SMS APIs, and summarization APIs.