iOS Face recognition

There is a nice API for face/person recognition on the internet at http://www.face.com/.
Their API provides quite a lot of interesting data, such as

  • Position of the eyes
  • Position of the nose
  • Position of the mouth (right, center, left bounds)
  • Yaw/roll/pitch rotation of the detected head
  • Attributes: gender, wearing glasses, smiling, mood, …

And the best of all … it’s a free service which gives you 5000 calls an hour to their API which is more than enough for a little experiment.

I’ve created a little trainer app (ios) in which you can test their service and see what data gets returned. The app has 3 steps:

  1. Detect – Take a picture (make sure you take it in landscape mode, home button on the right side).
    Add first and last name to the picture (i’ve implemented a core data database so you don’t have to re-enter the name for the same user) and send the photo to Face.com. They will return a temporary tag id which you can use in the next step.
  2. Train – Train the user, so Face.com starts to know the face.
  3. Recognize – After you’ve trained the user with a few pictures, you will get positive hits when you take a picture of a person you have trained.

If you want to dive in and try creating a cool mashup for yourself, then you can download my sourcefiles at GitHub.  The code could use some cleanup, but it’s a start to get you going!
If you want to build the project, you will need to add you API and secret key to the FaceConstants.h file!

Happy coding!

Share this post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Posts