Computer scientists have been experimenting with facial recognition systems going back to the 1960s, but it was only relatively recently that this technology was connected to sophisticated application programming interfaces. These allow developers to pass information back and forth over open ports exposed by a library, which makes it far easier to design applications that end-users can actually work with. Website coders could accept information from a facial recognition tool to see whether or not someone was logging into their page legitimately, for instance.
Financial institutions have relied on facial recognition tools for the same reasons. Now, however, the introduce of a new kind of face detection API is making it possible to create composite software that includes face scanning tools as well as many other features. Individuals who want to integrate a facial recognition widget in their programs shouldn’t have any difficulty doing so.
Possibilities for New API-based Services
Information technology department staffers have long used APIs to share information between programs that otherwise wouldn’t be able to communicate. Data sent through them is usually in the form of numerical sheets or text, but there’s no reason that photographs can’t be passed as a constant stream of bits. Programmers who do this can make calls to a facial recognition service through a standard shell script. All they have to do is provide the path for a particular image to it the same way that they would have if they were working with any other scripting arguments. Since everything hides behind a convenient abstraction layer, they won’t even need to know how the recognition service itself works. All that’s needed is a request sent in the right format.
New Uses for Existing Technology
Pure research projects have been the primary driving force behind many radical new applications of existing facial recognition technology. For instance, computer scientists are finding that they can search through huge groups of photographs that they’ve added to databases through the years. These databases can expose their own API, which then sends data over through a facial detector’s API to match certain individuals. Images can then be sorted into groups easily, based on who or what is in them. Creative programmers are hard at work on mobile phone apps that do this with photos stored either on a subscriber’s handset or in the cloud.
Engineers and IT department staffers who want to further explore the benefits of using an API should try SkyBiometry free trial. They’ll have access to a wide variety of software tools that can detect faces at a number of different angles while simultaneously parsing more than one face in a single image. Savvy users are even finding that they can spot certain individuals even they’re wearing glasses or showing an unusual expression. That’s making it a popular package for those in the research community.
