Face detection and recognition API by face.com

face. com is a website that offers face detection and recognition API services.

The API is able to detect faces from an image and match the faces found to your friends on Facebook and Twitter via Facebook Connect and Twitter Connect.

The site offers a very nice demo to let you experience the functionality before digging to deep to the source code. The API is efficient on detection but rather weak on face recognition.

The way this API works is by first detecting faces from an image. All faces found are saved in an array and visually appear as tags. Once that's done the you can custom the API to run a variety of tasks based on the result.

No only can this API detect & recognize faces, it can also tell the gender of the person in the photo and whether or not the person was wearing glasses. The face recognition API also work fast. It takes just a few seconds to match amount 600 friends of my on facebook. The results come out very unsatisfying unfortunately. Each API call returns one high confidence match and five lower confidence matches. I tried several photo that has only one person and several with multiple faces taken by iPhone and a number of point and shoot camera, none of them comes out accurate. The prefect match is not even listed as one of the top 6 confident match.

Despite the test result doesn't convince me to trust the face recognition method, but this is such a good start executable web and will be a big part of the future web 3.0.