What's new in Azure Face service?

The Azure Face service is updated on an ongoing basis. Use this article to stay up to date with new features, enhancements, fixes, and documentation updates.

July 2021

New HeadPose and Landmarks improvements for Detection_03

  • The Detection_03 model has been updated to support facial landmarks.
  • The landmarks feature in Detection_03 is much more precise, especially in the eyeball landmarks which are crucial for gaze tracking.

April 2021

PersonDirectory data structure

  • In order to perform face recognition operations such as Identify and Find Similar, Face API customers need to create an assorted list of Person objects. The new PersonDirectory is a data structure that contains unique IDs, optional name strings, and optional user metadata strings for each Person identity added to the directory. Currently, the Face API offers the LargePersonGroup structure which has similar functionality but is limited to 1 million identities. The PersonDirectory structure can scale up to 75 million identities.
  • Another major difference between PersonDirectory and previous data structures is that you'll no longer need to make any Train calls after adding faces to a Person object—the update process happens automatically. For more details see Use the PersonDirectory structure.

February 2021

New Face API detection model

  • The new Detection 03 model is the most accurate detection model currently available. If you're a new a customer, we recommend using this model. Detection 03 improves both recall and precision on smaller faces found within images (64x64 pixels). Additional improvements include an overall reduction in false positives and improved detection on rotated face orientations. Combining Detection 03 with the new Recognition 04 model will provide improved recognition accuracy as well. See Specify a face detection model for more details.

New detectable Face attributes

  • The faceMask attribute is available with the latest Detection 03 model, along with the additional attribute "noseAndMouthCovered" which detects whether the face mask is worn as intended, covering both the nose and mouth. To use the latest mask detection capability, users need to specify the detection model in the API request: assign the model version with the detectionModel parameter to detection_03. See Specify a face detection model for more details.

New Face API Recognition Model

  • The new Recognition 04 model is the most accurate recognition model currently available. If you're a new customer, we recommend using this model for verification and identification. It improves upon the accuracy of Recognition 03, including improved recognition for enrolled users wearing face covers (surgical masks, N95 masks, cloth masks). Now customers can build safe and seamless user experiences that detect whether an enrolled user is wearing a face cover with the latest Detection 03 model, and recognize who they are with the latest Recognition 04 model. See Specify a face recognition model for more details.

January 2021

Mitigate latency

December 2020

Customer configuration for Face ID storage

  • While the Face Service does not store customer images, the extracted face feature(s) will be stored on server. The Face ID is an identifier of the face feature and will be used in Face - Identify, Face - Verify, and Face - Find Similar. The stored face features will expire and be deleted 24 hours after the original detection call. Customers can now determine the length of time these Face IDs are cached. The maximum value is still up to 24 hours, but a minimum value of 60 seconds can now be set. The new time ranges for Face IDs being cached is any value between 60 seconds and 24 hours. More details can be found in the Face - Detect API reference (the faceIdTimeToLive parameter).

November 2020

Sample Face enrollment app

  • The team published a sample Face enrollment app to demonstrate best practices for establishing meaningful consent and creating high-accuracy face recognition systems through high-quality enrollments. The open-source sample can be found in the Build an enrollment app guide and on GitHub, ready for developers to deploy or customize.

August 2020

Customer-managed encryption of data at rest

  • The Face service automatically encrypts your data when persisting it to the cloud. The Face service encryption protects your data to help you meet your organizational security and compliance commitments. By default, your subscription uses Microsoft-managed encryption keys. There is also a new option to manage your subscription with your own keys called customer-managed keys (CMK). More details can be found at Customer-managed keys.

April 2020

New Face API Recognition Model

  • The new recognition 03 model is the most accurate model currently available. If you're a new customer, we recommend using this model. Recognition 03 will provide improved accuracy for both similarity comparisons and person-matching comparisons. More details can be found at Specify a face recognition model.

June 2019

New Face API detection model

April 2019

Improved attribute accuracy

  • Improved overall accuracy of the age and headPose attributes. The headPose attribute is also updated with the pitch value enabled now. Use these attributes by specifying them in the returnFaceAttributes parameter of Face - Detect returnFaceAttributes parameter.

Improved processing speeds

March 2019

New Face API recognition model

January 2019

Face Snapshot feature

October 2018

API messages

May 2018

Improved attribute accuracy

  • Improved gender attribute significantly and also improved age, glasses, facialHair, hair, makeup attributes. Use them through Face - Detect returnFaceAttributes parameter.

Increased file size limit

March 2018

New data structure

May 2017

New detectable Face attributes

  • Added hair, makeup, accessory, occlusion, blur, exposure, and noise attributes in Face - Detect returnFaceAttributes parameter.
  • Supported 10K persons in a PersonGroup and Face - Identify.
  • Supported pagination in PersonGroup Person - List with optional parameters: start and top.
  • Supported concurrency in adding/deleting faces against different FaceLists and different persons in PersonGroup.

March 2017

New detectable Face attribute

  • Added emotion attribute in Face - Detect returnFaceAttributes parameter.

Fixed issues

November 2016

New subscription tier

  • Added Face Storage Standard subscription to store additional persisted faces when using PersonGroup Person - Add Face or FaceList - Add Face for identification or similarity matching. The stored images are charged at $0.5 per 1000 faces and this rate is prorated on a daily basis. Free tier subscriptions continue to be limited to 1,000 total persons.

October 2016

API messages

July 2016

New features

  • Supported Face to Person object authentication in Face - Verify.
  • Added optional mode parameter enabling selection of two working modes: matchPerson and matchFace in Face - Find Similar and default is matchPerson.
  • Added optional confidenceThreshold parameter for user to set the threshold of whether one face belongs to a Person object in Face - Identify.
  • Added optional start and top parameters in PersonGroup - List to enable user to specify the start point and the total PersonGroups number to list.

V1.0 changes from V0

  • Updated service root endpoint from https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/face/v0/ to https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/face/v1.0/. Changes applied to: Face - Detect, Face - Identify, Face - Find Similar and Face - Group.
  • Updated the minimal detectable face size to 36x36 pixels. Faces smaller than 36x36 pixels will not be detected.
  • Deprecated the PersonGroup and Person data in Face V0. Those data cannot be accessed with the Face V1.0 service.
  • Deprecated the V0 endpoint of Face API on June 30, 2016.