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Microsoft Azure Face API and Unity

During one of my projects, I came across Microsoft's face recognition API (Azure Face API) and it looked good enough to recognize people's faces and detect if a person is a newcomer or a repeating customer to our store.


As our installations mainly use the game engine Unity, I wanted to be able to use the Face API from Unity. Face API does not have an SDK for Unity but their requests are just HTTP requests so the Networking classes in Unity can be wrapped into methods to make it easy to call these APIs.

First of all, to those who just want to see the code, here it is.

My tests focus on the identification of a face in an input image. The full tutorial I followed can be found here.
The Main scene goes through the steps in the tutorial such as creating a PersonGroup and adding Persons to the group if it is not created yet.

Just make sure you:

  • Change the API key. I used a free trial key which is no longer valid.
  • Use whatever images you want. I don't mind you using my own photos which are included in the project's folders.
RequestManager.cs contains all the methods that call Face API and FaceRecognizer.cs is the main script that utilizes these methods to perform face registration and detection, once the PersonGroup is already created.
The app is not built to be smart though, so if detects there is still not any PersonGroup created, it will create a PersonGroup and stops. You will need to quit Game mode and rerun it to make it progress to the next step. When all steps according to the tutorial has been completed, it will perform the face identification against all input images in the test folder.

One example of the detection performed on one of my images is shown below.


Hope this helps anyone who wants to use the Face API from Unity and leave comments if you have any questions!

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