In this Azure tutorial, we will discuss Azure Cognitive Services Face API.
Cognitive Services Face API
Well, here we will discuss an important topic, i.e., Azure Cognitive Services Face API or What is Azure Face API?
The Face API provides an advanced algorithm that helps you detect or read human faces in different digital images. That includes detecting the emotions and facial expressions like happiness, fear, etc. It also helps to apply the person identification feature that matches an individual up to 1 million people.
In this world where technologies are growing rapidly space. We are moving towards implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence almost everywhere. AI-based technologies are booming now.
The Azure Cognitive Services Face API allows the Developers to implement these features with just an API call. No expertise is needed in the area of AI and ML. It saves the developer a lot of time and effort to implement such an excellent feature in your application.
You can directly integrate the Azure Cognitive Services Face API with your application. It solves a lot of business problems for your application. Especially, when you want to implement the authentication for your Application, implementing the authentication with the Azure Cognitive Services Face API is one of the best ways.
Mainly here, we are Verifying and just trying to match a face against a specific person. One of the best examples is when we try to unlock our Mobile or Laptop with the Face unlock feature.
This API helps us to perform several tasks like face detection, grouping of faces, and face identification when you have a requirement to find similar faces among a group of faces.
The Azure Face API considers different key properties like the one below while detecting a face from an image.
- The person is a male or a female.
- The approximate age of the person.
- The person in the image wears a glass or not.
- Different facial attributes like eyes, nose, lips, hair, etc.
- The person’s facial expressions are sadness, happiness, and anger.
- The scale of emotion for that person.
Key Benefits of Azure Cognitive Services Face API
There are many excellent features of Azure Cognitive Services Face API available. We will discuss a few key features of Azure Cognitive Services Face API.
- An important feature of Azure Cognitive Services Face API is that it is easy to use and saves a lot of time and coding effort from a developer’s perspective to implement such an amazing AI feature.
- It helps you by providing an Advanced facial recognition mechanism. You will have the opportunity to implement that in your application.
- You can deploy the Azure Cognitive Services Face API easily.
- As security is important, Microsoft has focused more on security in the case of Azure Cognitive Services Face API. High-end security and privacy apply to your data and the model to ensure no unauthorized access.
So these are Some key benefits of Azure Cognitive Services Face API.
Key Features of Azure Cognitive Services Face API
Above, we discussed Some key benefits of Azure Cognitive Services Face API. We will discuss the key features of the Azure Cognitive Services Face API.
- The first feature of Azure Cognitive Services Face API is Face detection with the exact location of the face in the image. It also provides other attributes like gender, age, hair, nose, eyes, etc., whether the person wears glasses or not.
- Identification of a specific known individual.
- Verification is a type of facial recognition where we try to match the face with a single person, not a group.
- Face grouping is a group of the same individual providing a list of faces.
Creating The Face API On Azure Portal
We will discuss How To Create The Face API On Azure Portal. Before discussing the steps, we need to know the Prerequisites for Creating The Face API On Azure Portal.
Prerequisites
- You must have a valid Azure Subscription or a Valid Azure Account. If you don’t have till now, create an Azure Free Account now.
Assuming you have a Valid Azure Account or Azure Subscription, Let’s start creating the Face API On Azure Portal.
1. Log in to the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com/)
2. Once you log in to the Azure Portal, click the + Create a Resource button from the left side panel.
3. On the New window, click on the AI + Machine Learning option from the left side and then click the Face option.
On the Create Face window, provide the below details
- Subscription: Select the valid subscription that you want to use to create the Azure Face API. In case you have multiple subscriptions, make sure to select the correct subscription.
- Resource Group: Choose an existing Resource Group, and if you don’t have an existing Resource Group, create a new one by clicking on the Create new link as highlighted below.
- Region: Select the region for your Azure Resource.
- Name: Provide a unique name for your Azure Face API.
- Pricing tier: Select the pricing tier as per your business needs. You can choose the Free F0 tier if you do this operation for Demo purposes. You can click the View Pricing Details link to check out the Pricing structure per your business needs.
- Select the checkbox to accept the terms and conditions for Creating The Face API On Azure Portal.
Finally, click the Review + Create button on the Create Face window.
4. Now, it will validate all the details and show you Validation Passed once it finds all the details are correct. Then, it will enable the Create button to Create The Face API On the Azure Portal. If it finds any of the options is incorrect, it will not enable the Create button. The Create button will remain disabled if you enter any invalid options.
Now as you can see below, The Deployment is completed successfully without any issue. Click the Go to Resource button to navigate to the Face API you have created now.