Face.com (facial recognition) Face.com is a Tel Aviv-based technology company that developed a platform for efficient and accurate facial recognition in photos uploaded via web and mobile applications. Face.com apps and API services scan billions of photos monthly and tag faces in those photos, tying them directly to available social networking information. As of February, 2011, the company had “discovered” 18 billion faces across its API and Facebook applications.[1]
The company was established in 2009, and maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel with 10 full-time employees. Face.com has developed and released two Facebook applications: Photo Finder and Photo Tagger. Photo Finder allows users to find untagged pictures of themselves as well as friends on Facebook and then tag those photos. Photo Tagger enables bulk-tagging of faces that appear in multiple photos uploaded to the Facebook website.
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In March 2010, Face.com opened an Alpha of their free REST API[2] , allowing third party developers to integrate the Face.com facial recognition technology, algorithms, and database of tagged faces with their own apps and services. The REST API gave developers free access to all of the platform’s technology, with some applicable rate limits while also offering white listing and premium licensing options. With the API, developers could tag and recognize users from Facebook and Twitter, attach Face.com technology to their own index of images, or even mix and match facial recognition across photo sources, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and more.[3]
In February 2011, Face.com’s API program moved from Alpha to Beta, increasing the rate limit from 200 scanned photos per hour to 5,000 photos per hour[4]. As of February 10, more than 10,000 developers were using the Face API.[5]
Face.com has raised a total of $5.3 million in funding for their face recognition technology. A Series A round, totaling $1 million was raised in February 2009. In September 2010, the company announced that it had closed a Series B round of $4.3 million,[6] led by previous investor Rhodium and Russia-based investor Yandex
In 2011, a study conducted at the University of Massachusetts compared a portion of the Face.com algorithm to other available facial recognition algorithms and found Face.com to be the most accurate and effective of those tested.[7]