

Face++: API for face detection – also detects gender, age, pose - gagzilla
http://www.faceplusplus.com/demo-detect/

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downandout
I have some experience with computer vision [1]. It is non-trivial and
requires real processing power to do it at scale. So I suspect they'll be
charging soon unless they have a huge amount of funding. Other than that
potential issue, this looks like a fairly usable, credible API.

[1] I wrote software to scan Facebook profile photos for overweight people. We
store their ID's for targeting through FB ads.

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romanlevin
Can you actually target Facebook ads at specific users?

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MatthewMcDonald
You can target a group of specific users. There are some restrictions (minimum
group size) but there are ways around it.[1]

[1] [http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-
pranking-...](http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-
roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

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romanlevin
This is fucking terrifying.

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ParvusPonte
I believe this is a good place to plug a very usable open source computer
vision project: [http://openbiometrics.org/](http://openbiometrics.org/)

Fantastic alternative you can hack with if you're allergic to APIs that
"might" charge their free service in the future.

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balakk
Another project that I think is really good is dlib :
[http://dlib.net](http://dlib.net)

To compare how well it works compared to OpenCV's face detector:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsK0hzcEyHI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsK0hzcEyHI)

dlib is also great at picking out facial landmarks:
[http://blog.dlib.net/2014/08/real-time-face-pose-
estimation....](http://blog.dlib.net/2014/08/real-time-face-pose-
estimation.html)

Between dlib and OpenBR, I think almost all of these usecases can be covered
without commercial APIs - if you have a large enough training set.

Face Recognition is a whole another matter though.

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ape4
Sadly none of these free/open projects can do gender, age, pose

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davis685
dlib does pose, see: [http://blog.dlib.net/2014/08/real-time-face-pose-
estimation....](http://blog.dlib.net/2014/08/real-time-face-pose-
estimation.html). No gender or age prediction though. Do many people care
about gender and age prediction?

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alexhawdon
Those characteristics including ethnicity can be useful for marketing
purposes.

I remember reading about a shop that used this sort of technology to profile
their customers. It revealed that at a certain time of week they received an
unusually large number of Japanese customers (turned out they were on a tour
bus route) and responded by repositioning their Japanese member of staff to be
a greeter during these periods and it significantly improved their revenue.

A similar product based around this idea might be clothes shop dummies with
this built in. This would provide an interesting profile of the people
interested in the particular outfit the dummy was modelling which might be
useful for further advertising targeting or in the case of a multi-national
brand some insights into what they should advertise in which regions.

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arb99
Looks interesting, might implement this on a project soon.

Their pricing is a bit iffy though... " The Face++ APIs are currently provided
free of charge. However, Face++ may charge fees for future use of or access to
the Face++ APIs or the Face++ services according to its sole discretion. If
Face++ decides to charge for the Face++ APIs Services, Face++ will provide you
prior notice of such charges. Face++ may also charge You when providing You a
service different from the service under these Terms; for example, we may
charge additional fees for excessive API use. "

not even a rough clue given as to how much they'll charge (could be
reasonable, or very expensive)...

but, still, looks very good

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bsenftner
How do they get away with using all those celebrity photos?

Founder/CEO of the 3D Avatar Store here. We do most of what they do: face
detection, facial feature detection and tracking, smile/expression analysis,
and facial recognition. And we go further with 3D Reconstruction into
performance animation ready 3D geometry, automated lip sync generation and so
on.

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chacham15
A lot of people dont know or dont care. E.g. look at mightytexts website[1].

[1] [http://mightytext.net/](http://mightytext.net/)

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huskyr
I've tried this for a hobby project, and was quite surprised by the quality of
the API. I'm a bit wary though because of the lack of a clear business model /
pricing on their website.

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helloshow
Reminds me of Kairos - facial recognition API
api[http://www.kairos.com/](http://www.kairos.com/)

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coleca
Thanks for the mention. CTO of Kairos here.

We offer a web API that will perform 2d to 3d facial recognition which helps
greatly when dealing with natural world images as opposed to mug shot type of
controlled imagery. We turn the 2d image into a 3d model and then normalize
the pose and lighting before performing the matching leading to higher results
on everyday pictures.

Check us out at www.kairos.com

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bdg
This is fun, but it thinks I'm about 20 years older than I am, and the grey-
beard Swedish sysadmin was identified as a black woman.

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quasarj
Yep. I'm a 30 year old bearded man. It said it was 99.7% sure I'm a 47 year
old woman. At least it got my race right! Though it was only 77% sure of that.

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benjamincburns
Recognition leaves something to be desired. Detection classifies her as
female, 40 years old ±10 years. Recognition apparently doesn't add metadata
parameters from detection into it's weighting:

[http://imgur.com/n23vVQT](http://imgur.com/n23vVQT)

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vtempest
[http://challengepost.com/software/smileforce](http://challengepost.com/software/smileforce)

ran emotional sentiment analysis from an ipad camera while user scrolled thru
menu items. won a prize in salesforce $1 hackathon

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dheera
What's the principle behind gender detection? Is it based on machine learning
algorithms trained with a huge pile of data, or is there some inherent
geometric difference between male and female faces that I'm missing?

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matsiyatzy
There's definitely geometric differences between male and female faces. The
most distinct difference is that the male chin tends to be larger, giving the
face a more "square" shape, while female faces have smaller chins, giving the
face a slight "almond" shape. And I'm sure there's more subtle differences as
well.

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sinzone
Test it in the browser: [https://www.mashape.com/faceplusplus/faceplusplus-
face-detec...](https://www.mashape.com/faceplusplus/faceplusplus-face-
detection)

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NKCSS
Lol, it doesn't like my picture much :P I'm a 31 year old white guy (ok, was
29 in the picture) and it tells me I'm probably 43 with 7 variance and black
:P

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V-2
I'm in my 30s and the software thinks I'm 7 or 14, depending on the pic :) And
I don't look this childish at all

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neals
So what are some people building with this? I'm curious of the possibilities,
which probably are endless.

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amelius
What comes to mind is a generic "upload profile photo" for websites, where the
system can automatically crop your uploaded photo. Or even just to check that
it is a "valid" photo.

Not sure how the gender/age info would be useful.

That's the best I can come up with. My brain actually works best in the
opposite direction (problem->solution) :)

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marcelocamanho
Already getting 504 errors. Such an API cannot be free unless they got a huge
amount of funding...

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binwiederhier
This is really awesome. Good job! And the response time is pretty fast too.

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arthurcolle
is this a project by the people at Face.com? I know they were acquired by fb
some time ago so it would be neat to know they are still working on related
stuff post-acquisition

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nnnnni
I wonder if this could be used to filter out duckface pictures...

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Andrenid
Doesn't work at all for me.

ILLEGAL_USE_OF_DEMO_KEY

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anonfunction
You have to sign up and create an app to get the key. From what I could gather
there is no limit or pricing on the site. Once you are in to the developer
center they have you can see the docs and use the API. It's quite nice, even
if it ages me at 31, a bit older than I am.

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chetangole
It is not even detecting my face!

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anonfunction
It needs a good photo of mostly just your face in order to get a good
detection. Detected my face quite accurately, I'd try again with a headshot.

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nly
So you need to detect the face before you can detect the face...

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kp666
happy to see this...was using face.com till facebook bought them :(

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ninjaplease
Meh. Betaface has had this for years.

