Facial recognition has already been a hot topic recently, but with the announcement of iPhone X’s Face ID technology, facial recognition has become an even more popular topic.
We wanted to help you get started using facial recognition in your own apps & software, so here is a list of 10 best facial recognition APIs of 2018!
Table of Contents
The Facial Recognition APIs
- Kairos – Offers a wide variety of image recognition solutions through their API. Their API endpoints include identifying gender, age, emotional depth, facial recognition in both photo and video, and more.
- Trueface.ai – One flaw with some facial recognition APIs is that they are unable to differentiate between a face and a picture of a face. TrueFace.ai solves that problem with their ability to do spoof detection through their API.
- Amazon Rekognition – This facial recognition API is fully integrated into the Amazon Web Service ecosystem. Using this API will make it really easy to build applications that make use of other AWS products.
- Face Recognition and Face Detection by Lambda Labs – With over 1,000 calls per month in the free pricing tier, and only $0.0024 per extra API call, this API is a really affordable option for developers wanting to use a facial recognition API.
- EmoVu by Eyeris – This API was created by Eyeris and it is a deep learning-based emotion recognition API. EmoVu allows for great emotion recognition results by identifying facial micro-expressions in real-time.
- Microsoft Face API – One cool feature that I found while doing research on the Microsoft Face API, is that the API has the ability to do “similar face search.” When this API endpoint is given a collection of faces, and a new face as a query, the API will return a collection of similar faces from the collection.
- Animetrics Face Recognition – Using advanced 2D-to-3D algorithms, this API will convert a 2D image into a 3D model. The 3D model will then be used for facial recognition purposes.
- Face++ – This API also has an offline SDK for iOS & Android for you to use. The offline SDK does not provide face recognition, but it can perform face detection, comparing, tracking and landmarks, all while the phone does not have cell service.
- Google Cloud Vision – By being integrated into the Google Cloud Platform, this API will be a breeze for you to integrate into applications that are already using other Google Cloud Platform products and services.
- IBM Watson Visual Recognition – Whether it is faces, objects, colors, or food, this API lets you identify many different types of classifiers. If the included classifiers aren’t enough, then you can train and use your own custom classifiers.
Honorable Mention
- OpenCV – Although OpenCV isn’t an API, it still deserves mention in this list. With over 3,000 optimized computer vision algorithms, there are a lot of options for how developers can make use of this open source computer vision and machine learning library.
Summary: Best Facial Recognition APIs for Apps and Software
| API | Available Endpoints | Created by | All Time Users (as of 19/07/2018) | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Animetrics Face Recognition | 25 | Animetrics | 10,296 | Free up to 1,000 calls/month Additional pricing tiers available |
| AWSRekognition | 9 | Amazon | 21,252 | Free up to first 1,000 minutes/month for first year Additional pricing tiers by region |
| EmoVu | 2 | Eyeris | 8,748 | Free up to 500 calls/month Additional pricing tiers available |
| Face Recognition and Face Detection | 7 | Lambda Labs | 61,164 | Free up to 1,000 calls/month Additional pricing tiers available |
| FacePlusPlus | 2 | Face++ | 237,204 | Free version available Additional pricing tiers available |
| Google Cloud Vision | 9 | 10,654 | First 1000 units/month are free, then increases depending on features | |
| IBM Watson Visual Recognition | 7 | IBM | 2,521 | Free and premium tiers |
| Kairos | 7 | Kairos | 12,096 | Starting at $500/month Additional pricing tiers available |
| Microsoft Face API | 30 | Microsoft | 121,259 | Free version up to 20 transactions per minute and 30,000 transactions per month Additional pricing tiers available |
| Trueface.ai | 9 | Trueface.ai | 432 | Free up to 1,000 calls/month Additional pricing tiers available |
I think you should evaluate http://facex.io
Relatively new to the ball game and I started using their API calls just because they gave 5000 free calls – which was great and proved to be rather much more accurate than kairos or Microsoft face.
Hi Safeer, thanks for sharing this. We’re sorry for the really late reply as we missed your comment. We’ll have a look at facex.io for sure. In the meantime, we just launched ‘Rakuten RapidAPI 2.0’ – a completely renewed UI with some cool functionality. Would you like to have a demo?