What is Face API?

Introduction

The Azure Face API service provides the facial analysis functionality. The service can help to detect, recognize, and analyze the faces present in an image. Facial recognition and analysis are important aspects in various applications like identity verification, blurring the faces for privacy reasons, and controlling devices using facial expressions, and so on.

The Azure Face service can help us to perform the below operations:

• Detect faces with facial expressions and facial features like hair, eyes, head pose, and so on.
• Verify identity
• Group similar faces

Let’s discuss these one by one.

Detecting faces

The Face service can identify all the faces present in the image. It can also identify features related to each of the faces as mentioned below:

• The age of the person as per the face identified.
• The gender of the person as per the face identified.
• The head position of the person as per the face identified.
• Different emotions are depicted by the face of the person whether he is smiling or exhibiting other facial expressions or wearing glasses.
• Some other features include facial hair, glasses, hair, makeup, and accessories, even if the image is blurred or masked.

Verifying identity

By identifying a face in the image, the Face service can also help to detect whether the face in a new image is the same person as a face identified previously. The face identification and face verification can help to verify that a user is who they claim to be. We’ll explore this functionality in depth in the coming lessons.

Grouping similar faces

The Face service can also group faces based on the similarity of the facial features present in the image. We’ll explore this functionality in the coming lessons as well.

Creating the Face API resource

To continue with this chapter, we’ll need the Azure face API resource. We’ll be learning how to create the Face API resource using the Azure web portal. You can follow the below steps to create the Face API resource.