Face

Detect and compare human faces
Organize images into groups based on similarities
Identify previously tagged people in images
Run locally on-premises or in the cloud

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Recognize faces on the edge, on premises, and in the cloud using containers. Learn more

Face verification

Check the likelihood that two faces belong to the same person. The API will return a confidence score about how likely it is that the two faces belong to one person.

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Documentation

Face detection

Detect human faces in an image, including small, sideways, and blurry faces. The service can also make machine learning-based predictions of features and attributes, including age, emotion, gender, pose, smile, and facial hair, along with 27 landmarks for each face in the image.

See it in action

Detection result:
detection_02
JSON:
 [
  {
    "faceId": "2baca0bd-f4bc-4ad4-8818-2137c308aede",
    "faceRectangle": {
      "top": 76,
      "left": 446,
      "width": 226,
      "height": 284
    },
    "faceAttributes": null,
    "faceLandmarks": null
  }
]

Detection Model:

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Documentation

Emotion recognition

The Face API now integrates emotion recognition, returning the confidence across a set of emotions for each face in the image such as anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. These emotions are understood to be cross-culturally and universally communicated with particular facial expressions.

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Anger	0.00000
Contempt	0.00000
Disgust	0.00000
Fear	0.00000
Happiness	0.19600
Neutral	0.00000
Sadness	0.00000
Surprise	0.80300

Detection result:
1 faces detected

 JSON:
 [
  {
    "faceRectangle": {
      "top": 141,
      "left": 130,
      "width": 162,
      "height": 162
    },
    "faceAttributes": {
      "emotion": {
        "anger": 0.0,
        "contempt": 0.0,
        "disgust": 0.0,
        "fear": 0.0,
        "happiness": 0.196,
        "neutral": 0.0,
        "sadness": 0.0,
        "surprise": 0.803
      }
    }
  }
]

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Documentation

Face identification

Face API enables you to search, identify, and match faces in your private repository of up to 1 million people.

Similar face search

Easily find similar-looking faces. Given a collection of faces and a new face as a query, this API will return a collection of similar faces.

Face grouping

Organize many unidentified faces together into groups, based on their visual similarity.

"By enhancing our service with the Face API, we have a competitive advantage in markets that demand a high degree of facial detection accuracy."

Daniel Amitai: Vice President of Business Development | Cloudinary

"Because the Cognitive Services APIs harness the power of machine learning, we were able to bring advanced intelligence into our product without the need to have a team of data scientists on hand."

Aaron Edell: Chief Product Owner | GrayMeta

"We found Cognitive Services to be the missing piece in the equation, the one that we needed to bring this solution to market and really revolutionize the way people look at video."

Katie McCann: Vice President of Product and Engineering | Prism Skylabs

"Thousands of partners sign in to our platform every hour. The response time from the Face API is incredible, enabling us to verify our drivers without slowing them down."

Dima Kovalev: Product Manager | Uber

"It didn't take us long to realize Microsoft Cognitive Services had handed us a powerful set of computer-vision and artificial-intelligence tools that we could use to create great apps and new features for our customers in just a few hours."

John Fan: Cofounder and CEO | Cardinal Blue Software

"Using the Cognitive Services APIs, it took us three months to develop a test pair of glasses that can translate text and images into speech, identify emotions, and describe scenery. If we had been working full time, we could have done it in two weeks."

Benoit Chirouter: R&D Director | Pivothead