Face.com API shutting down

by msencenb • 14 years ago

62 56 14 years ago

kilian• 14 years ago

sigh. I had just ported over one of my sites to their API and was superhappy to have it back online (it was offline before when I relied on opencv but then the only host supporting that shut down).

And only a 30 day notice? For shame. Are there any worthy alternatives? Maybe even some I can pay so maybe they stick around longer?

objclxt• 14 years ago

It's their API, and they can do what they want with it - but I'm not entirely sure shutting it down is entirely in line with "we love you guys [API users], and the plan is to continue to support our developer community", which is what they posted on their blog when the acquisition was announced.

A lot of people took this to mean the API was going to keep running.

loceng• 14 years ago

Facebook's trying to maintain a closed ecosystem. API being available wasn't likely to happen. Just shows you how genuine and steadfast to their authenticity they are..

gaius• 14 years ago

When a company is acquired (I speak from experience) the first thing its people are told is, nothing is going to change for you, we bought you for what you do, and we want you to go on doing it, with the support of our sales organization, or words to that effect.

This isn't strictly a lie, because the person who says this genuinely believes it. But the problem comes from, he doesn't stick around to follow through. Maybe he gets promoted. Maybe he's the "acquisitions guy" and he's gone onto the next juicy startup to tell them the same thing.

The guy you actually end up working for doesn't care about your startup. To him, you're just employees of the firm who got hired a slightly different way than the Graduate Trainee Fast Track Programme he came in on, and it's not that he resents you as outsiders or anything, he just doesn't see why you shouldn't be treated and act the same as everyone else. And since you work for him now, you vote either way with your feet.

msahil• 14 years ago

it was only a matter of time they would do. If a company is sold off, they would no longer support their existing API users

roblesjm5• 14 years ago

It's time to make an alternative face.com

traveller• 14 years ago

There is an alternative from Betaface, and it is also free for non-commercial apps: http://www.betafaceapi.com http://www.betafaceapi.com/service.svc/help

alpb• 14 years ago

that's so bad. I know many products empower their products with face API. Now they are shutting down their core feature. It made me understand that we shouldn't rely on commercial stuff and build technologies upon open source software once again. At least this way, things keep running instead shutting down because of business choices.

sarbogast• 14 years ago

I so needed this service. When I heard the news they were acquired by Facebook, I knew it would come to that. It's really a shame. Facebook is starting to worry me. If they start to buy and digest every innovative service out there, thus preventing others to innovate in the process, they start to look more and more like a black hole and it's scary.

Dn_Ab2• 14 years ago

I don't know. I think this will spur innovation that facebook couldn't possibly buy all of. People will be more likely to avoid building a core experience around a free service and instead either; innovate on their own and learn what is needed if it is really their dream or use an established open source platform if a sufficient solution exists. One downside to some open source projects is that they are meant to be flexible to a lot of use cases so you get a lot of subjective bloat with respect to your use case. But in the early stages, if the api is only a side show but main enabler to the key idea, it's still worth it to ignore the "bloat".

Our society/economy is currently not advanced enough to support free services nor are there many options to hide/divert costs sufficiently as not to matter. Eventually any free service must come to an end.

PanMan2• 14 years ago

That's a big bummer! I was going to run a project on their API in about six weeks. :(. Also surprising given their announcement at acquisition they would support existing developers. Anybody knows of a replacement? How hard is it to set up opencv? And how well will it work? I assume for the 60 million they must have some pretty good tech at face.com.

ksolanki3• 14 years ago

OpenCV is not too difficult to setup, but is not as accurate w.r.t. face recognition -- it is not OpenCV's fault (in fact, it is an amazing project, thanks to folks who contribute to it!) -- the accuracy has lot to do with the size and breadth of the training data.

possibilistic2• 14 years ago

How hard would it be for the public to curate massive amounts of training data for an open features/descriptors project? Instead of an API, just download the nightlies and drop them into your project. I have a feeling such a tool would help audio/video applications significantly.

joelthelion2• 14 years ago

Take the occasion to start using open source software that you control instead of a fragile web API controlled by someone else.

rabidsnail• 14 years ago

Face detection is one of those things that gets better the more examples you have. There's an incentive for it to centralize.

doh• 14 years ago

Do you know any good alternatives?

pjmlp• 14 years ago

Welcome to the wonderful world of closed source with "Open APIs".

warrenmiller• 14 years ago

I have to remove and Android and an IOS because of the api shutdown. Kinda sucks.

sabalaba2• 14 years ago

We can feel the pain -- I know a lot of people who are using that API. I've won a few hackathons using it myself.

Thankfully, we're making an -- eventually open-source -- alternative to Face.com's REST API:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4211271

thechut5• 14 years ago

I signed up for your beta. What features do you plan on offering? Even if you give your code away for free, I bet you could charge some money for access to an easy to use REST API for whatever you come up with.

sabalaba2• 14 years ago

It's going to be a freemium model--unlike Face.com which didn't even have a paid option. I think there could be some advantages to having an openly developed algorithm in the background, mainly so you could embed the project where a REST API would be unwieldy (low bandwidth / low connectivity environments).

kaolinite• 14 years ago

But what will we do without https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnmngbknombiopoggi... ? :-(

roblesjm5• 14 years ago

Wee! Time to work in an open solution. I just bought "face-alt.org" (launchrock ready soon)

My idea is start with a similar API for face detection using Viola-Jones OpenCV algorithm fork (available in GitHub) and reduce the false positive/negative rate.

NO business-model, only donate for AWS service cost.

"Nature makes its way"

nivertech• 14 years ago

We developed a GPU-accelerated fast face detection using Viola-Jones. If there is enough interest we can expose it as a web API. Contact me if you interested.

Tichy2• 14 years ago

TL;DR: don't build upon other companies APIs.

wpietri• 14 years ago

I disagree, at least for startups using infrastructure like this.

A startup testing some sort of hypothesis about a product or a market should get it out in front of people as soon as possible, and that should include using things like this. If they shut down, they shut down.

By that point, if you find some sort of product/market fit, you can always build your own face recognition, or switch to an alternate provider. If your product is a bust, then who cares if the API is gone?

Either way, there's no sense in a startup spending time building anything until it becomes the very highest-value thing they can do. There should be too many novel, risky hypotheses to test to worry about testing the one like "our team can build an adequate facial recognition service."

Tichy2• 14 years ago

Point taken, if you have a plan B, why not.

ansgri3• 14 years ago

What to do instead if that's API to an unique service?

thechut5• 14 years ago

My face.com app was simply a side project not something to make money on or even sell.

They provided a good service for free, and made it way easier then other way of doing CV.

If you were actually interested in this project space I'mnot sure why you would use anything other than face.com's API

franzus• 14 years ago

eggs and basket analogy applies here.

gdbrown• 14 years ago

i see face.com is giving extensions to devs who ask for it (i did, thanks @face)

i hope it'll be back on graph, too good to let go...

roblesjm5• 14 years ago

http://signup.face-alt.org launchrock-site Up!

Meanwhile, I'm already working in the first REST API iteration for face detection using OpenCV.

thechut5• 14 years ago

are you planning on doing just face detection or actual facial recognition?

roblesjm5• 14 years ago

I need a face detection API ASAP but I hope add facial recognition soon. This project is free and open to everyone who wants contribute it.

thechut5• 14 years ago

I literally just finished a hardware project based on the face.com API. I want to be furious but I guess you cant blame them for creating such a great product. I knew it must be too good be true, and free forever. It sucks though because this was just a side project for me and I'm not sure it's worth the time to develop my own OpenCV system.

I'll be checking out the alternatives and resources you guys are posting though, HN is great!

Fuck you facebook...

Steve_Ward_VH1• 14 years ago

If you're looking for some work in this area please send me an email through my site, http://mastermatchmakers.com.

nutanc• 14 years ago

Should be a good opportunity for some new guy to come out with a Face recognition API. I was doing some work and we compared their recognition results with some of the opensource toolkits and also with our own proprietary algo. Face.com's recognition rates were not that extra ordinary. So lets see if someone takes advantage of this opportunity.

apu3• 14 years ago

For those who're looking at implementing a similar service, you should first start by looking at this project from researchers at UC-Irvine: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~xzhu/face/

This work was just presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the leading conference in vision. This paper was an oral presentation (< 5% submissions are), and having worked in this space, this is the real deal -- their results are incredible, and I've already heard that they are indeed reproducible.

Normally, face algorithms operate independently, in a sort of pipeline: face detection ("where in the image are the faces") -> pose detection ("which direction are the faces looking?") -> fiducial detection ("where are the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. on each face?") -> alignment ("warp the faces to make them have a more similar pose") -> recognition ("what is the identity of each face?").

This method does the first three in an integrated way (face, pose, and fiducial detection), and with many fewer training examples than most commercial systems (including face.com and Google's Picasa) achieves really impressive performance. This is a huge deal, because normally more training data = better performance, and also because by doing all three steps together, the numbers reported are much less optimistic than they normally are in such papers (which always assume that things "upstream" happen perfectly).

The need for less data matters especially for open systems, as many are suggesting to build in the comments here, because sharing images of faces runs into copyright and privacy issues. As a company, you can collect a large dataset of images and if you never share it with anyone, then it's okay to use for training your algorithms. But if you're building an open consortium/system, then almost by definition that requires the training images to be shared, which is a big problem because now you're limited to a very small set of available data that is cleared for such use.

As far as code, there is Matlab code available on the linked page, but it's not clear what their license is. By default, I would assume it's "for research purposes only", but the paper goes into some amount of detail on the method which would allow people to reproduce it from scratch if they are worried. The approach itself is quite similar to the traditional "flexible part model" that is the basis for most top-performing object recognition methods (co-invented by one of the authors of this paper, btw), and the modifications to deal with faces are not very complicated.

Face recognition is still very much an unsolved problem, and while the face.com guys had some interesting approaches, it is not clear that they were necessarily the right way to go. And a large part of getting recognition right is getting all the previous steps right, so building on this work would be a good place to start.

Also, one way of building a recognition system ("whose face is this?") is using verification ("are these two faces of the same person?") as the key inner loop. If you take this approach, then you should pay close attention to the results on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, which is the current de-facto standard that vision researchers evaluate on: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html

Since this is my area of expertise, I'm happy to answer any other questions that people might have.

amunita• 14 years ago

You should see http://www.biometrycloud.com They seem to have a good aproach to facial recognition.

drpgq• 14 years ago

I'm a research scientist at Cognitec. We've been around for over ten years now (just celebrated our tenth anniversary in June).

If you're interested in face recognition, I suggest checking us out. We offer an SDK rather than an API usually with a two month free trial. More hassle, but less worry that an API will suddenly shut down with no warning.

syedasifiqbal• 14 years ago

My thoughts on 3rd Party APIs - Can't Live With or Without Them http://syedasifiqbal.com/post/26722039475/3rd-party-api

davidbates• 14 years ago

I had a demo of this api in a few weeks. luckily face.com is allowing developers to extend access beyond the initial date it has set forth. to apply go here: http://developers.face.com/extension-request/ you have to be logged in.

yanivgolan• 14 years ago

There's another alternative which claim to do face detection (not recognition) and more coming up soon http://sightborg.com.

Face.com API shutting down

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