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)

Installation

Python 3 / Python 2 are fully supported. Only macOS and Linux are tested. I have no idea if this will work on Windows.

Install this module from pypi using pip3 (or pip2 for Python 2):

pip3 install face_recognition

IMPORTANT NOTE: It's very likely that you will run into problems when pip tries to compile the dlib dependency. If that happens, check out this guide to installing dlib from source (instead of from pip) to fix the error:

How to install dlib from source

After manually installing dlib, try running pip3 install face_recognition again to complete your installation.

Usage

Command-Line Interface

When you install face_recognition, you get a simple command-line program called face_recognition that you can use to 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.

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

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.

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.

• Find faces in a photograph
• Identify specific facial features in a photograph
• Apply (horribly ugly) digital make-up
• Find and recognize unknown faces in a photograph based on photographs of known people
• Recognize faces in live video using your webcam (Requires OpenCV to be installed)

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.

Caveats

• The face recognition model is trained on adults and does not work very well on children. It tends to mix up children quite easy using the default comparison threshold of 0.6.

Thanks

• Many, many thanks to Davis King (@nulhom) for creating dlib and for providing the trained facial feature detection and face encoding models used in this library. For more information on the ResNet that powers the face encodings, check out his blog post.
• Thanks to everyone who works on all the awesome Python data science libraries like numpy, scipy, scikit-image, pillow, etc, etc that makes this kind of stuff so easy and fun in Python.
• Thanks to Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template for making Python project packaging way more tolerable.