

Face.com API shutting down - msencenb
http://face.com/

======
objclxt
It's their API, and they can do what they want with it - but I'm not entirely
sure shutting it down is entirely in line with "we love you guys [API users],
and the plan is to continue to support our developer community", which is what
they posted on their blog when the acquisition was announced.

A lot of people took this to mean the API was going to keep running.

~~~
gaius
When a company is acquired (I speak from experience) the first thing its
people are told is, nothing is going to change for you, we bought you for what
you do, and we want you to go on doing it, with the support of our sales
organization, or words to that effect.

This isn't strictly a lie, because the person who says this genuinely believes
it. But the problem comes from, he doesn't stick around to follow through.
Maybe he gets promoted. Maybe he's the "acquisitions guy" and he's gone onto
the next juicy startup to tell them the same thing.

The guy you actually end up working for doesn't care about your startup. To
him, you're just employees of the firm who got hired a slightly different way
than the Graduate Trainee Fast Track Programme he came in on, and it's not
that he resents you as outsiders or anything, he just doesn't see why you
shouldn't be treated and act the same as everyone else. And since you work for
him now, you vote either way with your feet.

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apu
For those who're looking at implementing a similar service, you should first
start by looking at this project from researchers at UC-Irvine:
<http://www.ics.uci.edu/~xzhu/face/>

This work was just presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition (CVPR), the leading conference in vision. This paper was an oral
presentation (< 5% submissions are), and having worked in this space, this is
the real deal -- their results are incredible, and I've already heard that
they are indeed reproducible.

Normally, face algorithms operate independently, in a sort of pipeline: face
detection ("where in the image are the faces") -> pose detection ("which
direction are the faces looking?") -> fiducial detection ("where are the eyes,
nose, mouth, etc. on each face?") -> alignment ("warp the faces to make them
have a more similar pose") -> recognition ("what is the identity of each
face?").

This method does the first three in an integrated way (face, pose, and
fiducial detection), and with many fewer training examples than most
commercial systems (including face.com and Google's Picasa) achieves really
impressive performance. This is a huge deal, because normally more training
data = better performance, and also because by doing all three steps together,
the numbers reported are much less optimistic than they normally are in such
papers (which always assume that things "upstream" happen perfectly).

The need for less data matters especially for open systems, as many are
suggesting to build in the comments here, because sharing images of faces runs
into copyright and privacy issues. As a company, you can collect a large
dataset of images and if you never share it with anyone, then it's okay to use
for training your algorithms. But if you're building an open
consortium/system, then almost by definition that requires the training images
to be shared, which is a big problem because now you're limited to a very
small set of available data that is cleared for such use.

As far as code, there is Matlab code available on the linked page, but it's
not clear what their license is. By default, I would assume it's "for research
purposes only", but the paper goes into some amount of detail on the method
which would allow people to reproduce it from scratch if they are worried. The
approach itself is quite similar to the traditional "flexible part model" that
is the basis for most top-performing object recognition methods (co-invented
by one of the authors of this paper, btw), and the modifications to deal with
faces are not very complicated.

Face recognition is still very much an unsolved problem, and while the
face.com guys had some interesting approaches, it is not clear that they were
necessarily the right way to go. And a large part of getting recognition right
is getting all the previous steps right, so building on this work would be a
good place to start.

Also, one way of building a recognition system ("whose face is this?") is
using verification ("are these two faces of the same person?") as the key
inner loop. If you take this approach, then you should pay close attention to
the results on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, which is the
current de-facto standard that vision researchers evaluate on: <http://vis-
www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html>

Since this is my area of expertise, I'm happy to answer any other questions
that people might have.

~~~
amunita
You should see <http://www.biometrycloud.com> They seem to have a good aproach
to facial recognition.

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thechut
I literally just finished a hardware project based on the face.com API. I want
to be furious but I guess you cant blame them for creating such a great
product. I knew it must be too good be true, and free forever. It sucks though
because this was just a side project for me and I'm not sure it's worth the
time to develop my own OpenCV system.

I'll be checking out the alternatives and resources you guys are posting
though, HN is great!

Fuck you facebook...

~~~
Steve_Ward_VH1
If you're looking for some work in this area please send me an email through
my site, <http://mastermatchmakers.com>.

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PanMan
That's a big bummer! I was going to run a project on their API in about six
weeks. :(. Also surprising given their announcement at acquisition they would
support existing developers. Anybody knows of a replacement? How hard is it to
set up opencv? And how well will it work? I assume for the 60 million they
must have some pretty good tech at face.com.

~~~
joelthelion
Take the occasion to start using open source software that you control instead
of a fragile web API controlled by someone else.

~~~
rabidsnail
Face detection is one of those things that gets better the more examples you
have. There's an incentive for it to centralize.

------
kilian
_sigh_. I had just ported over one of my sites to their API and was superhappy
to have it back online (it was offline before when I relied on opencv but then
the only host supporting that shut down).

And only a 30 day notice? For shame. Are there any worthy alternatives? Maybe
even some I can pay so maybe they stick around longer?

------
roblesjm
Wee! Time to work in an open solution. I just bought "face-alt.org"
(launchrock ready soon)

My idea is start with a similar API for face detection using Viola-Jones
OpenCV algorithm fork (available in GitHub) and reduce the false
positive/negative rate.

NO business-model, only donate for AWS service cost.

"Nature makes its way"

------
pjmlp
Welcome to the wonderful world of closed source with "Open APIs".

------
sarbogast
I so needed this service. When I heard the news they were acquired by
Facebook, I knew it would come to that. It's really a shame. Facebook is
starting to worry me. If they start to buy and digest every innovative service
out there, thus preventing others to innovate in the process, they start to
look more and more like a black hole and it's scary.

~~~
Dn_Ab
I don't know. I think this will spur innovation that facebook couldn't
possibly buy all of. People will be more likely to avoid building a core
experience around a free service and instead either; innovate on their own and
learn what is needed if it is really their dream or use an established open
source platform if a sufficient solution exists. One downside to some open
source projects is that they are meant to be flexible to a lot of use cases so
you get a lot of subjective bloat with respect to your use case. But in the
early stages, if the api is only a side show but main enabler to the key idea,
it's still worth it to ignore the "bloat".

Our society/economy is currently not advanced enough to support free services
nor are there many options to hide/divert costs sufficiently as not to matter.
Eventually any free service must come to an end.

------
sabalaba
We can feel the pain -- I know a lot of people who are using that API. I've
won a few hackathons using it myself.

Thankfully, we're making an -- eventually open-source -- alternative to
Face.com's REST API:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4211271>

~~~
thechut
I signed up for your beta. What features do you plan on offering? Even if you
give your code away for free, I bet you could charge some money for access to
an easy to use REST API for whatever you come up with.

~~~
sabalaba
It's going to be a freemium model--unlike Face.com which didn't even have a
paid option. I think there could be some advantages to having an openly
developed algorithm in the background, mainly so you could embed the project
where a REST API would be unwieldy (low bandwidth / low connectivity
environments).

~~~
thechut
That sounds good, I think freemium is the way to go. When I first found
face.com I thought to myself that I would have no problem paying for their
service. I am definitely interested in your project. And I think developing in
the open will be hugely helpful.

For my purposes though the REST API is what's more useful since my problem is
not connectivity or bandwidth but processing power. Right now my software is
running on a Raspberry Pi which can just barely run motion for capturing the
pictures, I would need a real computer to run a full OpenCV install. That is
why the face.com API suited my needs so well.

Are you planning on offering facial recognition along with the face detection
or just focusing on face detection for now?

------
nivertech
We developed a GPU-accelerated fast face detection using Viola-Jones. If there
is enough interest we can expose it as a web API. Contact me if you
interested.

------
nutanc
Should be a good opportunity for some new guy to come out with a Face
recognition API. I was doing some work and we compared their recognition
results with some of the opensource toolkits and also with our own proprietary
algo. Face.com's recognition rates were not that extra ordinary. So lets see
if someone takes advantage of this opportunity.

------
alpb
that's so bad. I know many products empower their products with face API. Now
they are shutting down their core feature. It made me understand that we
shouldn't rely on commercial stuff and build technologies upon open source
software once again. At least this way, things keep running instead shutting
down because of business choices.

------
Tichy
TL;DR: don't build upon other companies APIs.

~~~
wpietri
I disagree, at least for startups using infrastructure like this.

A startup testing some sort of hypothesis about a product or a market should
get it out in front of people as soon as possible, and that should include
using things like this. If they shut down, they shut down.

By that point, if you find some sort of product/market fit, you can always
build your own face recognition, or switch to an alternate provider. If your
product is a bust, then who cares if the API is gone?

Either way, there's no sense in a startup spending time building anything
until it becomes the very highest-value thing they can do. There should be too
many novel, risky hypotheses to test to worry about testing the one like "our
team can build an adequate facial recognition service."

~~~
Tichy
Point taken, if you have a plan B, why not.

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davidbates
I had a demo of this api in a few weeks. luckily face.com is allowing
developers to extend access beyond the initial date it has set forth. to apply
go here: <http://developers.face.com/extension-request/> you have to be logged
in.

------
drpgq
I'm a research scientist at Cognitec. We've been around for over ten years now
(just celebrated our tenth anniversary in June).

If you're interested in face recognition, I suggest checking us out. We offer
an SDK rather than an API usually with a two month free trial. More hassle,
but less worry that an API will suddenly shut down with no warning.

------
syedasifiqbal
My thoughts on 3rd Party APIs - Can't Live With or Without Them
<http://syedasifiqbal.com/post/26722039475/3rd-party-api>

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kaolinite
But what will we do without
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnmngbknombiopoggi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnmngbknombiopoggilgiebonllnndhp)
? :-(

------
roblesjm
<http://signup.face-alt.org> launchrock-site Up!

Meanwhile, I'm already working in the first REST API iteration for face
detection using OpenCV.

~~~
thechut
are you planning on doing just face detection or actual facial recognition?

~~~
roblesjm
I need a face detection API ASAP but I hope add facial recognition soon. This
project is free and open to everyone who wants contribute it.

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yanivgolan
There's another alternative which claim to do face detection (not recognition)
and more coming up soon <http://sightborg.com>.

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gdbrown
i see face.com is giving extensions to devs who ask for it (i did, thanks
@face)

i hope it'll be back on graph, too good to let go...

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msahil
it was only a matter of time they would do. If a company is sold off, they
would no longer support their existing API users

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roblesjm
It's time to make an alternative face.com

~~~
traveller
There is an alternative from Betaface, and it is also free for non-commercial
apps: <http://www.betafaceapi.com>
<http://www.betafaceapi.com/service.svc/help>

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doh
Do you know any good alternatives?

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warrenmiller
I have to remove and Android and an IOS because of the api shutdown. Kinda
sucks.

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franzus
eggs and basket analogy applies here.

