Prerequisites
Azure account.
Microsoft Cognitive Services
Microsoft Cognitive Services provide us the ability to build apps with powerful algorithms using just a few lines of code. These services work across devices and platforms( such as iOS, Android, and Windows), keep improving, and are easy to set up.
APIs, given below, are available under Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services.
- Face API
- Emotion API
- Computer Vision API
- Bing Speech API
- Speaker Recognition API
- Language Understanding Intelligent Service
- Text Analytics API
- Web Language Model API
- Bing Spell Check API
- Recommendations API
- Academic Knowledge API
- Bing Search APIs
- Bing Autosuggest API
Now, let's discuss the Face API and how to create a Face API Service on Azure Portal.
Face API
Microsoft Face API is a cloud-based service that offers the most advanced face algorithms. Face API has two main functions.
- Face Detection, with attributes
- Face Recognition.
Face Detection
You can detect one or more human faces in an image and get the face rectangles on them, along with the face attributes which contain machine learning-based predictions of facial features. After detecting faces, we can take the face rectangle and pass it to the Emotion API to speed up the processing. The face attribute features available, are, Age, Gender, Pose, Smile, and Facial Hair along with 27 landmarks for each face in the image.
![Face Detection]()
Face Recognition
Face recognition is widely used in many scenarios including security, natural user interface, image content analysis and management, mobile apps, and robotics. Four Face Recognition Functions are provided: Face Verification, Finding Similar Faces, Face Grouping, and Person Identification.
- Face Verification: Check the possibility that two faces belong to the same person. The API will return a confidence score about how likely it is that the two faces belong to one person.
![Face Verification]()
- Face Identification: Search and identify faces. Tag people and groups with user-provided data and then search those for a match with previously unseen faces.
- Similar Face Searching: Easily find similar-looking faces. Given a collection of faces and a new face as a query, this API will return a collection of similar faces.
- Face Grouping: Organize many unidentified faces together into groups, based on their visual similarity.
Create a new Face API in the Azure Portal
Now, let's get started with the following steps.
Step 1. Sign in to the online Microsoft Azure Portal.
Step 2. Click "+NEW" and choose "Intelligence + Analytics". Select "Cognitive Service APIs (preview)".
![Service APIs]()
Step 3. In the new account blade, enter the Account Name, select Subscription, and select API type as Face API from the list of available APIs.
![Account Name]()
Step 4. Next, we need to choose the Location, Pricing tier, and Resource group.
![Location]()
Step 5. Next, we need to "Accept" the license term.
![Accept]()
Step 6. Finally, click the Create button to create a Cognitive Service.
![Create]()
A few minutes later, the Face API dashboard will appear. Then, we can download face APIs and use them in our project.
![Face API]()
Summary
In this article, we discussed how to create a Face API in Microsoft Azure Portal.