Project setup

Just to recap, the example for this chapter is about performing facial recognition and tagging the recognized person's name (or alias) into the scene. In this section, we will walk through setting up the Microsoft Cognitive Service, which will be responsible for facial detection and identification as well as preparing the dataset that we will use to perform facial identification, that is, photos of people you would like the service to recognize.

We will use one of the Cognitive Services Microsoft services, called Face API, from Face API. As the name implies, the service is orientated around detecting and identifying faces but also allows for some interesting metadata, such as the following:

• Age
• Gender
• Likelihood of smiling
• Wearing glasses
• Emotion (a measurement of happiness, sadness, and anger, along with many others)
• Presence of facial hair

Before you can make use of the service, you must register (if not done so already) an Azure account and add the service to your portal, details described in the next section.