Face Recognition

Recognize and manipulate faces from Python or from the command line with the world's simplest face recognition library.

Built using dlib's state-of-the-art face recognition built with deep learning. The model has an accuracy of 99.38% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild benchmark.

This also provides a simple face_recognition command line tool that lets you do face recognition on a folder of images from the command line!

Features

Find faces in pictures

Find all the faces that appear in a picture:

import face_recognition
image = face_recognition.load_image_file("your_file.jpg")
face_locations = face_recognition.face_locations(image)

Find and manipulate facial features in pictures

Get the locations and outlines of each person's eyes, nose, mouth and chin.

import face_recognition
image = face_recognition.load_image_file("your_file.jpg")
face_landmarks_list = face_recognition.face_landmarks(image)

Finding facial features is super useful for lots of important stuff. But you can also use for really stupid stuff like applying digital make-up (think 'Meitu'):

Identify faces in pictures

Recognize who appears in each photo.

import face_recognition
known_image = face_recognition.load_image_file("biden.jpg")
unknown_image = face_recognition.load_image_file("unknown.jpg")

biden_encoding = face_recognition.face_encodings(known_image)[0]
unknown_encoding = face_recognition.face_encodings(unknown_image)[0]

results = face_recognition.compare_faces([biden_encoding], unknown_encoding)

You can even use this library with other Python libraries to do real-time face recognition:

See this example for the code.

Installation

Requirements

• Python 3.3+ or Python 2.7
• macOS or Linux (Windows not officially supported, but might work)

Installation Options:

Installing on Mac or Linux

First, make sure you have dlib already installed with Python bindings:

• How to install dlib from source on macOS or Ubuntu

Then, install this module from pypi using pip3 (or pip2 for Python 2):

pip3 install face_recognition

If you are having trouble with installation, you can also try out a pre-configured VM.

Installing on Raspberry Pi 2+

• Raspberry Pi 2+ installation instructions

Installing on Windows

While Windows isn't officially supported, helpful users have posted instructions on how to install this library:

• @masoudr's Windows 10 installation guide (dlib + face_recognition)

Installing a pre-configured Virtual Machine image

• Download the pre-configured VM image (for VMware Player or VirtualBox).

Usage

Command-Line Interface

When you install face_recognition, you get a two simple command-line programs:

• face_recognition - Recognize faces in a photograph or folder full for photographs.
• face_detection - Find faces in a photograph or folder full for photographs.

face_recognition command line tool

The face_recognition command lets you recognize faces in a photograph or folder full for photographs.

First, you need to provide a folder with one picture of each person you already know. There should be one image file for each person with the files named according to who is in the picture:

Next, you need a second folder with the files you want to identify:

Then in you simply run the command face_recognition, passing in the folder of known people and the folder (or single image) with unknown people and it tells you who is in each image:

$ face_recognition ./pictures_of_people_i_know/ ./unknown_pictures/

/unknown_pictures/unknown.jpg,Barack Obama
/face_recognition_test/unknown_pictures/unknown.jpg,unknown_person

There's one line in the output for each face. The data is comma-separated with the filename and the name of the person found.

An unknown_person is a face in the image that didn't match anyone in your folder of known people.

face_detection command line tool

The face_detection command lets you find the location (pixel coordinatates) of any faces in an image.

Just run the command face_detection, passing in a folder of images to check (or a single image):

$ face_detection  ./folder_with_pictures/

examples/image1.jpg,65,215,169,112
examples/image2.jpg,62,394,211,244
examples/image2.jpg,95,941,244,792

It prints one line for each face that was detected. The coordinates reported are the top, right, bottom and left coordinates of the face (in pixels).

Adjusting Tolerance / Sensitivity

If you are getting multiple matches for the same person, it might be that the people in your photos look very similar and a lower tolerance value is needed to make face comparisons more strict.

You can do that with the --tolerance parameter. The default tolerance value is 0.6 and lower numbers make face comparisons more strict:

$ face_recognition --tolerance 0.54 ./pictures_of_people_i_know/ ./unknown_pictures/

/unknown_pictures/unknown.jpg,Barack Obama
/face_recognition_test/unknown_pictures/unknown.jpg,unknown_person

If you want to see the face distance calculated for each match in order to adjust the tolerance setting, you can use --show-distance true:

$ face_recognition --show-distance true ./pictures_of_people_i_know/ ./unknown_pictures/

/unknown_pictures/unknown.jpg,Barack Obama,0.378542298956785
/face_recognition_test/unknown_pictures/unknown.jpg,unknown_person,None

More Examples

If you simply want to know the names of the people in each photograph but don't care about file names, you could do this:

$ face_recognition ./pictures_of_people_i_know/ ./unknown_pictures/ | cut -d ',' -f2

Barack Obama
unknown_person

Speeding up Face Recognition

Face recognition can be done in parallel if you have a computer with multiple CPU cores. For example if your system has 4 CPU cores, you can process about 4 times as many images in the same amount of time by using all your CPU cores in parallel.

If you are using Python 3.4 or newer, pass in a --cpus <number_of_cpu_cores_to_use> parameter:

$ face_recognition --cpus 4 ./pictures_of_people_i_know/ ./unknown_pictures/

You can also pass in --cpus -1 to use all CPU cores in your system.

Python Module

You can import the face_recognition module and then easily manipulate faces with just a couple of lines of code. It's super easy!

API Docs: https://face-recognition.readthedocs.io.

Automatically find all the faces in an image

import face_recognition

image = face_recognition.load_image_file("my_picture.jpg")
face_locations = face_recognition.face_locations(image)

# face_locations is now an array listing the co-ordinates of each face!

See this example to try it out.

You can also opt-in to a somewhat more accurate deep-learning-based face detection model.

Note: GPU acceleration (via nvidia's CUDA library) is required for good performance with this model. You'll also want to enable CUDA support when compliling dlib.

import face_recognition

image = face_recognition.load_image_file("my_picture.jpg")
face_locations = face_recognition.face_locations(image, model="cnn")

# face_locations is now an array listing the co-ordinates of each face!

See this example to try it out.

If you have a lot of images and a GPU, you can also find faces in batches.

Automatically locate the facial features of a person in an image

import face_recognition

image = face_recognition.load_image_file("my_picture.jpg")
face_landmarks_list = face_recognition.face_landmarks(image)

# face_landmarks_list is now an array with the locations of each facial feature in each face.
# face_landmarks_list[0]['left_eye'] would be the location and outline of the first person's left eye.

See this example to try it out.

Recognize faces in images and identify who they are

import face_recognition

picture_of_me = face_recognition.load_image_file("me.jpg")
my_face_encoding = face_recognition.face_encodings(picture_of_me)[0]

# my_face_encoding now contains a universal 'encoding' of my facial features that can be compared to any other picture of a face!

unknown_picture = face_recognition.load_image_file("unknown.jpg")
unknown_face_encoding = face_recognition.face_encodings(unknown_picture)[0]

# Now we can see the two face encodings are of the same person with `compare_faces`!

results = face_recognition.compare_faces([my_face_encoding], unknown_face_encoding)

if results[0] == True:
    print("It's a picture of me!")
else:
    print("It's not a picture of me!")

See this example to try it out.

Python Code Examples

All the examples are available here.

Face Detection

• Find faces in a photograph
• Find faces in a photograph (using deep learning)
• Find faces in batches of images w/ GPU (using deep learning)
• Blur all the faces in a live video using your webcam (Requires OpenCV to be installed)

Facial Features

• Identify specific facial features in a photograph
• Apply (horribly ugly) digital make-up

Facial Recognition

• Find and recognize unknown faces in a photograph based on photographs of known people
• Identify and draw boxes around each person in a photo
• Compare faces by numeric face distance instead of only True/False matches
• Recognize faces in live video using your webcam - Simple / Slower Version (Requires OpenCV to be installed)
• Recognize faces in live video using your webcam - Faster Version (Requires OpenCV to be installed)
• Recognize faces in a video file and write out new video file (Requires OpenCV to be installed)
• Recognize faces on a Raspberry Pi w/ camera
• Run a web service to recognize faces via HTTP (Requires Flask to be installed)
• Recognize faces with a K-nearest neighbors classifier

How Face Recognition Works

If you want to learn how face location and recognition work instead of depending on a black box library, [read my article](https://medium.com/@ageitgey/machine-learning-is-fun-part-4-moder