13 Azure Facial Recognition

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Facial recognition can be fun but it can also be troubling, as discussed in the Data Science Survival Guide. The MLHub package azface utilises the Azure Cognitive Services cloud to access closed source pre-built models. The package provides a demonstration, a graphical user interface, and command line tools that utilise the pre-built models.

Most of the commands provided by the package will accept a image or photo as a command line option. This might be a URL or a path to a local file. For our examples in this chapter the URLs we use are short URLs generated using bitly.

To install, configure, and demonstrate the package:

ml install   azface
ml configure azface
ml readme    azface
ml commands  azface
ml demo      azface

In addition to the demo command the package supports many computer vision operations including r ml_command(azface,detect), and similar:

ml detect  azface myfamily.jpg
ml similar azface me.jpg myteam.jpg

The source code for this MLHub package is available from github: https://github.com/gjwgit/azface.

Azure-based models, unlike the MLHub models in general, use closed source services which have no guarantee of ongoing availability and do not come with the freedom to modify and share. This cloud based service also sends your image files to Azure for analysis.



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