Face

An AI service that analyzes faces in images

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Deliver low-friction, state-of-the-art facial recognition

Embed facial recognition into your apps for a seamless and highly secured user experience. No machine learning expertise is required. Features include: face detection that perceives faces and attributes in an image; person identification that matches an individual in your private repository of up to 1 million people; perceived emotion recognition that detects a range of facial expressions like happiness, contempt, neutrality, and fear; and recognition and grouping of similar faces in images.

Advanced facial recognition

Recognize faces according to diverse attributes.

Easy-to-use

Add facial recognition to your apps—all through a single API call.

Flexible deployment

Run Face in the cloud or on the edge in containers.

Built-in security

Rely on enterprise-grade security and privacy applied to both your data and any trained models.

Apply facial recognition for a range of scenarios

Detect, identify, and analyze faces in images and videos. Build on top of this technology to support various scenarios—for example, authenticate people for access, count people in a space for crowd control, or garner crowd insights for media campaigns.

See it in action

Face detection

Detect one or more human faces along with attributes such as: age, emotion, pose, smile, and facial hair, including 27 landmarks for each face in the image.

Detection result:
detection_02
JSON:
 [
  {
    "faceId": "ebd0f5eb-309e-4dd4-a033-5342cc11e281",
    "faceRectangle": {
      "top": 76,
      "left": 446,
      "width": 226,
      "height": 284
    },
    "faceAttributes": null,
    "faceLandmarks": null
  }
]

Detection Model:

Face verification

Check the likelihood that two faces belong to the same person and receive a confidence score.

Verification result: The two faces belong to the same person. Confidence is 0.93468.

Perceived emotion recognition

Detect perceived facial expressions such as anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. It is important to note that facial expressions alone do not represent the internal states of people.

Anger	0.00000
Contempt	0.00000
Disgust	0.00000
Fear	0.00000
Happiness	1.00000
Neutral	0.00000
Sadness	0.00000
Surprise	0.00000

Anger	0.00000
Contempt	0.00000
Disgust	0.00000
Fear	0.00000
Happiness	0.99900
Neutral	0.00000
Sadness	0.00000
Surprise	0.00000

Anger	0.00000
Contempt	0.00000
Disgust	0.00000
Fear	0.00000
Happiness	1.00000
Neutral	0.00000
Sadness	0.00000
Surprise	0.00000

Anger	0.00000
Contempt	0.00000
Disgust	0.00000
Fear	0.00000
Happiness	1.00000
Neutral	0.00000
Sadness	0.00000
Surprise	0.00000

Detection result:
4 faces detected

 JSON:
 [
  {
    "faceRectangle": {
      "top": 114,
      "left": 212,
      "width": 65,
      "height": 65
    },
    "faceAttributes": {
      "emotion": {
        "anger": 0.0,
        "contempt": 0.0,
        "disgust": 0.0,
        "fear": 0.0,
        "happiness": 1.0,
        "neutral": 0.0,
        "sadness": 0.0,
        "surprise": 0.0
      }
    }
  },
  {
    "faceRectangle": {
      "top": 141,
      "left": 331,
      "width": 52,
      "height": 52
    },
    "faceAttributes": {
      "emotion": {
        "anger": 0.0,
        "contempt": 0.0,
        "disgust": 0.0,
        "fear": 0.0,
        "happiness": 0.999,
        "neutral": 0.0,
        "sadness": 0.0,
        "surprise": 0.0
      }
    }
  },
  {
    "faceRectangle": {
      "top": 110,
      "left": 70,
      "width": 51,
      "height": 51
    },
    "faceAttributes": {
      "emotion": {
        "anger": 0.0,
        "contempt": 0.0,
        "disgust": 0.0,
        "fear": 0.0,
        "happiness": 1.0,
        "neutral": 0.0,
        "sadness": 0.0,
        "surprise": 0.0
      }
    }
  },
  {
    "faceRectangle": {
      "top": 116,
      "left": 459,
      "width": 45,
      "height": 45
    },
    "faceAttributes": {
      "emotion": {
        "anger": 0.0,
        "contempt": 0.0,
        "disgust": 0.0,
        "fear": 0.0,
        "happiness": 1.0,
        "neutral": 0.0,
        "sadness": 0.0,
        "surprise": 0.0
      }
    }
  }
]

Get to market quickly

With Face, there’s no need to build facial recognition from scratch. All it takes is a single API call to deliver these capabilities in your apps.

Learn more

Deploy anywhere, from the cloud to the edge

Run Face in the cloud or on-premises with containers for various scenarios, including in-store and off-shore, where data security and low latency are paramount.

Learn more about containers

Built on industry-leading Azure security

Microsoft invests more than USD 1 billion annually on cybersecurity research and development.
We employ more than 3,500 security experts who are dedicated to data security and privacy.
Azure has more certifications than any other cloud provider. View the comprehensive list.

ISO/IEC

CSA/CCm

ITAR

CJIS

HIPAA

IRS 1075

Learn more about security on Azure

Get accurate facial recognition at competitive prices

Pay only for what you use, with no upfront costs. With Face, you pay as you go based on number of transactions.

See Face API pricing

Get started with Face

Get instant access and $200 credit by creating your Azure free account.

Learn how to embed facial recognition with five-minute quick-start tutorials and documentation.

Documentation and resources

Get started

Read our documentation

Take the Microsoft Learn course

Guidance

Get clear guidance on the proper use of facial recognition to help ensure it fits your goals and achieves accurate results.

See our Transparency Note

Trusted by companies of all sizes

"By enhancing our service with the Face API, we have a competitive advantage in markets that demand a high degree of facial detection accuracy."

Daniel Amitai: Vice President of Business Development | Cloudinary

"Because the Cognitive Services APIs harness the power of machine learning, we were able to bring advanced intelligence into our product without the need to have a team of data scientists on hand."

Aaron Edell: Chief Product Owner | GrayMeta

"We found Cognitive Services to be the missing piece in the equation, the one that we needed to bring this solution to market and really revolutionize the way people look at video."

Katie McCann: Vice President of Product and Engineering | Prism Skylabs

"Thousands of partners sign in to our platform every hour. The response time from the Face API is incredible, enabling us to verify our drivers without slowing them down."

Dima Kovalev: Product Manager | Uber

Watch the video

"It didn't take us long to realize Microsoft Cognitive Services had handed us a powerful set of computer-vision and artificial-intelligence tools that we could use to create great apps and new features for our customers in just a few hours."

John Fan: Cofounder and CEO | Cardinal Blue Software

"Using the Cognitive Services APIs, it took us three months to develop a test pair of glasses that can translate text and images into speech, identify emotions, and describe scenery. If we had been working full time, we could have done it in two weeks."

Benoit Chirouter: R&D Director | Pivothead

Frequently asked questions about Face

See availability by region.
Face and other Cognitive Services offerings guarantee 99.9-percent availability. No SLA is provided for the Free pricing tier. See SLA details.
No, your images are automatically deleted after processing. Read our compliance and privacy policy.

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