Facial and image recognition APIs have changed the world around us. Most importantly, these provide us a secure experience. The biometric access system at our workplace is the simplest example of this!
With so much utility that the facial and image recognition has, there is already a huge market for face recognition worldwide that is rising very rapidly. According to a report from ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global facial recognition market is expected to reach USD 9.78 billion by 2023 (Source).
Why Do You Need Facial and Image Recognition APIs?
Facial and image recognition APIs find wide use in applications providing security measures. From simple face recognition feature to unlock your mobile phone to biometric access system, facial and image recognition is a necessity today.
Have we wondered how an application disallows or rejects adult content? Well, this is also the result of facial and image recognition APIs that can recognize such images from a large pool or database and even help differentiate and remove these.
Face and image recognition technology is also needed in stock photography where photographers sell their work to include photos and videos. Facial and Image Recognition API helps differentiate such content and index them to make it easy for the customers to search and buy what they need.
Using visual search aided by face and image recognition APIs, users can find similar products from a reference image of a product. This is gaining immense popularity in e-commerce as it offers a great shopping experience to the users.
Which Are the Best Facial and Image Recognition APIs?
There is a wide range of facial and image recognition APIs available to assist developers. These offer different functionalities. Developers can thus choose among these options based on their budget and specific project needs. Here is a list of the popular APIs for facial and image recognition that developers can leverage.
1. Microsoft Computer Vision
Microsoft’s Computer Vision Facial and Image Recognition API offers high-level development algorithms to process images and return information. This can be used to analyze images and get insights about their visual features and characteristics.
This API helps you tag visual features, detect objects and brands, categorize and describe images, detect faces and image types, and even detect the color scheme.
In addition to a free basic plan, this is available in multiple paid plans starting from 19 USD to 199 USD per month.
2. Kairos Face Recognition
Kairos Face Recognition API is very popular for offering a wide range of image recognition solutions.
It offers face grouping, facial coordinates, age detection, gender detection, and diversity recognition. Kairos Face Recognition API enables you to identify gender, age, and even emotional depth in both photos and videos and the real world.
This API is very useful in combating identity fraud, meeting regulatory compliance, and providing a safe customer experience. It is available in multiple paid plans starting from 19 USD per month and goes up to 499 USD per month.
3. Animetrics Face Recognition
Animetrics Face Recognition API helps you detect human faces and feature points to perform facial recognition. You get the information on facial features to include ears, nose, eyebrows, lips, and chin as coordinates on the image. This also detects gender and orientation of faces along 3 axes.
If a facial photo is captured off-angle and you need a corrected fully frontal image, Animetrics Face Recognition offers a special capability for this called SetPose that allows re-rendering of the face at the desired pose from the captured pose.
It is available for free in the basic plan and the paid plans cost from 49 USD to 999 USD per month.
4. Lambda Labs Face Recognition
Lambda Labs’ Face Recognition API allows face detection, face recognition, and gender classification. It also provides specific features positioning to include eye position, nose position, and mouth position.
You can create an album or library of photos and this API will help you analyze and compare new photos and get results on the percentage compatibility of these with the existing photos in the library.
Lambda Labs’ Face Recognition API comes with a free plan along with multiple paid plan options ranging from 149 USD to 1449 USD per month.
5. Luxand.cloud Face Recognition
Luxand.cloud Face Recognition API detects and compares human faces. It helps you recognize age, gender, and emotion in the photo and identify previously tagged people in images.
This API facilitates search and verification of people in a photo or a collection of photos. You can also create a gallery to store images in a cloud with face recognition. In addition, you can add persons with their names and will get the IDs of those persons.
This age, gender, and emotions detection from photos is very useful to recognize alertness levels and track the satisfaction of the customers. With a free basic plan, it also offers paid plans from 19 USD to 499 USD per month.
6. EyeRecognize Face Detection
EyeRecognize Face Detection API provides coordinates for faces detected and their facial features to include eyes, nose, and mouth. It also returns biometric features to include gender, race, and age estimation.
This API accepts the URL of an image to return coordinates as above, face-to-image ratio, skin color, eye color, and hair color. With these details, it is a very useful API in face and image recognition.
The basic plan of EyeRecognize Face Detection API is available for free and paid plans to cost from 29 USD to 249 USD per month.
7. Face++ Face Detection
Face++ Face Detection API enables face detection, recognition, and analysis with deep learning models. These models are trained over millions of images to ensure maximum accuracy.
Key features of Face++ include face detection, face comparison, face identification, and body recognition with high accuracy. With this, you can detect the age, race, and gender from the given photo. Upload an image and get 1000 key points of the face and accurately locate the facial features and contours.
This API is available for free. Paid packages are available ranging from 500 USD to 10,500 USD according to the features needed.
8. Macgyver Face Recognition
Macgyver Face Recognition API with deep learning capabilities provide a range of tools for facial detection and recognition within images. It helps you to compare two faces, detect the presence of faces within an image, and returns coordinates (X, Y) of the faces detected in the images.
The Macgyver Face Recognition API uses machine learning and deep convolutional neural networks built in TensorFlow. It offers both free and flexible scaled pricing plans according to use.
9. BetaFace Face Recognition
With BetaFace Face Recognition API, it is easy to detect, analyze, recognize, and compare faces. It also provides detection of gender, age, expression, ethnicity, and adult content with multiple facial landmarks and 40+ facial attributes.
To summarize, you can detect faces and 22+101 (22 basic and 101 pro) facial landmarks. It allows you to compare faces, create and search faces inside your own databases. You can detect face age, gender, expression, and ethnicity.
It also offers the detection of facial attributes, geometrical properties, and colors to include the color of clothing and hairstyles. With this API, it is also possible to detect and differentiate adult content.
The basic plan of BetaFace Face Recognition is available for free and paid plans to range from 245 USD to 1595 USD per month.
10. Amazon (AWS) Rekognition
Amazon Rekognition or AWS Rekognition is an image analysis API that helps developers in adding an image and video analysis to the applications. With a picture or video provided, the API automatically distinguishes between the objects, scenes, faces, etc.
With Amazon Rekognition API, it is possible to recognize an individual in a photo or video using the private repository of face images. Also, the API can analyze the attributes of faces in the images and determine parameters like age range, happiness, eyes open, facial hair, glasses, etc.
The key features of this API include object and scene detection, facial recognition, facial analysis, face comparison, unsafe image detection, celebrity recognition, and text in the image.
AWS Rekognition offers a free tier for 12 months and then flexible paid plans with a per-image pricing model.
11. Trueface.ai
Trueface.ai Facial Recognition API allows developers to recognize, distinguish, and validate faces automatically. It also provides facial coordinates.
This API is capable of differentiating between a real face and a picture of the same and thus can be of great help in spoof detection. It enables the detection of multiple faces from an image or a video.
Apart from the key features of face identification and detection and spoof detection, Trueface.ai Facial Recognition API offers additional features to include blurring of unknowns, unique visitor counting, and region of interest recognition.
12. IBM Watson’s Visual Recognition
IBM Watson’s Visual Recognition API is another gem in the crown of computer vision and facial recognition APIs. It is very popular and widely trusted.
This API allows identification and classification of face, a food item, or a color. The key features of this API are face detection, gender detection, age detection, and detection of the bounding box of the face.
IBM Watson’s Visual Recognition API offers a basic free package. It has multiple paid plans too that charge for resources used.
13. ColorTag
ColorTag API is useful for color detection and image detection. When the user or the developer inputs an image file or URL, this API produces a list of text labels that can be used as tags for an image or item.
It allows sorting tags by relevance that includes detecting colors or objects on the image. This is very useful in e-commerce applications where users can search for items by color.
This API can provide descriptive color statistics for an image by performing color segmentation and histogram analysis.
ColorTag API offers a free basic plan. The paid plans cost from 18 USD to 250 USD per month.
14. Everypixel Image Recognition
EveryPixel Image Recognition API uses machine learning and AI to provide low-cost and easy image recognition.
The key features of EveryPixel Image Recognition API include image keywording, stock photography scoring, UGC photography scoring, and age recognition.
This API offers a free plan. Additionally, there are paid plans that charge on a per-day basis according to the features needed.
15. Eyeris EmoVu
EmoVu by Eyeris enables emotion recognition by identifying micro-expressions in real-time.
The key features of this API are face recognition, emotion recognition, gender recognition, and age recognition. Besides, it provides facial tracker and engagement and mood metrics.
16. Inferdo Face Detection
Inferdo’s Face Detection API detects the location of human faces from images. These are useful for face and gender detection, age estimation, and detecting facial features.
This API provides location coordinates of the detected faces of the face bounding box and identification of the detected bounding box being a face.
Inferdo Face Detection API offers a free basic plan with paid models starting from 10 USD per month to 1000 USD per month.
Wrapping Up
Facial and image recognition has revolutionized the security of mobile and web apps. High-precision APIs for facial and image recognition have made it easy for developers to generate innovative features to users and helped increase users’ trust.
Leverage the right APIs for facial and image recognition according to the features you need and your budget, to create the perfect product.
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