deepface

DeepFace is a lightweight face recognition and facial attribute analysis (age, gender, emotion and race) framework for python. It is a hybrid face recognition framework wrapping state-of-the-art models: VGG-Face, FaceNet, OpenFace, DeepFace, DeepID, ArcFace, Dlib, SFace, GhostFaceNet, Buffalo_L.

A modern face recognition pipeline consists of 5 common stages: detect, align, normalize, represent and verify. While DeepFace handles all these common stages in the background, you don’t need to acquire in-depth knowledge about all the processes behind it. You can just call its verification, find or analysis function with a single line of code.

Experiments show that human beings have 97.53% accuracy on facial recognition tasks whereas those models already reached and passed that accuracy level.

Installation

The easiest way to install deepface is to download it from PyPI. It's going to install the library itself and its prerequisites as well.

# to run deepface on tensorflow
$ pip install deepface[tensorflow]

# or to run deepface on pytorch
# $ pip install deepface[pytorch]

Alternatively, you can also install deepface from its source code. Source code may have new features not published in pip release yet.

$ git clone https://github.com/serengil/deepface.git
$ cd deepface
$ pip install -e .[tensorflow]  # or pip install -e .[pytorch]

Once you installed the library, then you will be able to import it and use its functionalities.

from deepface import DeepFace

💡 Prefer not to install or manage infrastructure? You can use a managed API via deepface.dev.

Face Verification - Demo

This function determines whether two facial images belong to the same person or to different individuals. The function returns a dictionary, where the key of interest is verified: True indicates the images are of the same person, while False means they are of different people.

result: dict = DeepFace.verify(img1_path = "img1.jpg", img2_path = "img2.jpg")

Face recognition - Tutorial, Demo

Face recognition requires applying face verification many times. DeepFace provides an out-of-the-box find function that searches for the identity of an input image within a specified folder, s3 or ftp.

dfs: List[pd.DataFrame] = DeepFace.find(img_path = "img1.jpg", db_path = "C:/my_db")

Database-backed face recognition - Demo

DeepFace supports database-backed operations for scalable face recognition, allowing embeddings to be explicitly registered in a database rather than processed on-the-fly or stored in local file structures. Supported backends include postgres, mongo, neo4j, pgvector, pinecone, milvus, qdrant, and weaviate.

• identify serves as a database-backed alternative to verify for 1:1 identity verification.
• search serves as a database-backed alternative to find for 1:N search with optional approximate nearest neighbor support.

# register images into the database
_ = DeepFace.register(img = "img1.jpg")
_ = DeepFace.register(img = ["img2.jpg", "img3.jpg"])

# identify a given image with a registered face
result: dict = DeepFace.identify(img = "target.jpg", identity_id = "17")

# perform exact search
dfs: List[pd.DataFrame] = DeepFace.search(img = "target.jpg")

# building index is required for ann search on postgres/mongo, but skipped for native vector dbs
_ = DeepFace.build_index()

# perform approximate nearest neighbor search
dfs: List[pd.DataFrame] = DeepFace.search(img = "target.jpg", search_method = "ann")

Facial Attribute Analysis - Demo

DeepFace also comes with a strong facial attribute analysis module including age, gender, facial expression (including angry, fear, neutral, sad, disgust, happy and surprise) and race (including asian, white, middle eastern, indian, latino and black) predictions.

objs: List[dict] = DeepFace.analyze(
  img_path = "img4.jpg", actions = ['age', 'gender', 'race', 'emotion']
)

Age model got ± 4.65 MAE; gender model got 97.44% accuracy, 96.29% precision and 95.05% recall as mentioned in its tutorial.

Real Time Analysis - Demo, React Demo part-i, React Demo part-ii

You can run deepface for real time videos as well. Stream function will access your webcam and apply both face recognition and facial attribute analysis. The function starts to analyze a frame if it can focus a face sequentially 5 frames. Then, it shows results 5 seconds.

DeepFace.stream(db_path = "C:/database")

Even though face recognition is based on one-shot learning, you can use multiple face pictures of a person as well. You should rearrange your directory structure as illustrated below.

user
├── database
│   ├── Alice
│   │   ├── Alice1.jpg
│   │   ├── Alice2.jpg
│   ├── Bob.jpg
│   ├── Charlie
│   │   ├── Charlie.jpg

Here, you can also find some real time demos for various models:

If you intend to perform face verification or analysis tasks directly from your browser, deepface-react-ui is a separate repository built using ReactJS depending on deepface api.

Embeddings - Tutorial, Demo

Face recognition models basically represent facial images as multi-dimensional vectors. Sometimes, you need those embedding vectors directly. DeepFace comes with a dedicated representation function.

embedding_objs: List[dict] = DeepFace.represent(img_path = "img.jpg")

Face recognition models - Demo

DeepFace is a hybrid face recognition package. It currently wraps many state-of-the-art face recognition models: VGG-Face , FaceNet, OpenFace, DeepFace, DeepID, ArcFace, Dlib, SFace, GhostFaceNet and Buffalo_L. The default configuration uses VGG-Face model.

models = [
    "VGG-Face", "Facenet", "Facenet512", "OpenFace", "DeepFace",
    "DeepID", "ArcFace", "Dlib", "SFace", "GhostFaceNet",
    "Buffalo_L",
]

result = DeepFace.verify(
  img1_path = "img1.jpg", img2_path = "img2.jpg", model_name = models[0]
)

dfs = DeepFace.find(
  img_path = "img1.jpg", db_path = "C:/my_db", model_name = models[1]
)

embeddings = DeepFace.represent(
  img_path = "img.jpg", model_name = models[2]
)

See BENCHMARKS for their accuracies.

Face Detection and Alignment - Demo

Face detection and alignment are important early stages of a modern face recognition pipeline. Experiments show that detection increases the face recognition accuracy up to 42%, while alignment increases it up to 6%. OpenCV, Ssd, Dlib, MtCnn, Faster MtCnn, RetinaFace, MediaPipe, Yolo, YuNet and CenterFace detectors are wrapped in deepface.

All deepface functions accept optional detector backend and align input arguments. You can switch among those detectors and alignment modes with these arguments. OpenCV is the default detector and alignment is on by default.

backends = [
    'opencv', 'ssd', 'dlib', 'mtcnn', 'fastmtcnn',
    'retinaface', 'mediapipe', 'yolov8n', 'yolov8m', 
    'yolov8l', 'yolov11n', 'yolov11s', 'yolov11m',
    'yolov11l', 'yolov12n', 'yolov12s', 'yolov12m',
    'yolov12l', 'yunet', 'centerface',
]
detector = backends[3]
align = True

obj = DeepFace.verify(
  img1_path = "img1.jpg", img2_path = "img2.jpg", detector_backend = detector, align = align
)

dfs = DeepFace.find(
  img_path = "img.jpg", db_path = "my_db", detector_backend = detector, align = align
)

embedding_objs = DeepFace.represent(
  img_path = "img.jpg", detector_backend = detector, align = align
)

demographies = DeepFace.analyze(
  img_path = "img4.jpg", detector_backend = detector, align = align
)

face_objs = DeepFace.extract_faces(
  img_path = "img.jpg", detector_backend = detector, align = align
)

RetinaFace overperforms among all face detection models in the portfolio.

Running RetinaFace On The Yellow Angels - Fenerbahce Women's Volleyball Team

See BENCHMARKS for their accuracies.

Face Anti Spoofing - Demo

DeepFace also includes an anti-spoofing analysis module to understand given image is real or fake. To activate this feature, set the anti_spoofing argument to True in any DeepFace tasks.

# anti spoofing test in face detection
face_objs = DeepFace.extract_faces(img_path="dataset/img1.jpg", anti_spoofing = True)
assert all(face_obj["is_real"] is True for face_obj in face_objs)

# anti spoofing test in real time analysis
DeepFace.stream(db_path = "C:/database", anti_spoofing = True)

Similarity - Demo

Face recognition models are regular convolutional neural networks and they are responsible to represent faces as vectors. We expect that a face pair of same person should be more similar than a face pair of different persons.

Similarity could be calculated by different metrics such as Cosine Similarity, Angular Distance, Euclidean Distance or L2 normalized Euclidean. The default configuration uses cosine similarity. According to experiments, no distance metric is overperforming than other.

metrics = ["cosine", "euclidean", "euclidean_l2", "angular"]

result = DeepFace.verify(
  img1_path = "img1.jpg", img2_path = "img2.jpg", distance_metric = metrics[1]
)

dfs = DeepFace.find(
  img_path = "img1.jpg", db_path = "C:/my_db", distance_metric = metrics[2]
)

API - Demo, Docker Demo

DeepFace serves an API as well - see api folder for more details. You can clone deepface source code and run the api with the following command. It will use gunicorn server to get a rest service up. In this way, you can call deepface from an external system such as mobile app or web.

# running the service directly
cd scripts && ./service.sh

# running the service via docker
cd scripts && ./dockerize.sh

Face verification, facial attribute analysis, vector representation and register & search functions are covered in the API. The API accepts images as file uploads (via form data), or as exact image paths, URLs, or base64-encoded strings (via either JSON or form data).

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:5005/represent \
   -d '{"model_name":"Facenet", "img":"img1.jpg"}'

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:5005/verify \
   -d '{"img1":"img1.jpg", "img2":"img3.jpg"}'

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:5005/analyze \
   -d '{"img": "img2.jpg", "actions": ["age", "gender"]}'

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:5005/register \
   -d '{"model_name":"Facenet", "img":"img18.jpg"}'

$ curl -X POST http://localhost:5005/search \
   -d '{"img":"img1.jpg", "model_name":"Facenet"}'

gRPC API

DeepFace can be served over gRPC as well. It covers the same functions as the REST API, and its contract is defined in deepface.proto.

# generate stubs from proto file
$ make grpc

# run the grpc server
$ make grpc-server

Images can be sent either as raw bytes of an image file, or as exact image paths, URLs or base64-encoded strings.

import grpc
from google.protobuf.json_format import MessageToDict
from deepface.api.proto import deepface_pb2, deepface_pb2_grpc

stub = deepface_pb2_grpc.DeepFaceServiceStub(grpc.insecure_channel("localhost:50051"))

with open("img1.jpg", "rb") as f:
  img1 = deepface_pb2.Image(content=f.read())
with open("img2.jpg", "rb") as f:
  img2 = deepface_pb2.Image(content=f.read())

response = stub.Verify(deepface_pb2.VerifyRequest(img1=img1, img2=img2))
result = MessageToDict(response.result)

DeepFace Cloud - Demo

Don’t want to host and scale DeepFace yourself? deepface.dev provides a managed API built on top of DeepFace.

• One API for verification, embeddings, and vector comparison
• Docs and machine-readable agent docs: docs.deepface.dev
• MCP endpoint: https://deepface.dev/mcp using a dedicated MCP key
• Usage-based pricing that scales from testing to production

Extended Applications

DeepFace isn't only for facial recognition, it can also be used for fun and insightful applications such as

Find Your Celebrity Look-Alike - Demo, Real-Time Demo, Tutorial

DeepFace can analyze your facial features and match them with celebrities, letting you discover which famous personality you resemble the most.

Find Which Parent a Child Look More - Demo, Tutorial

DeepFace can also be used to compare a child's face to their parents' or relatives' faces to determine which one the child resembles more.

Support

There are many ways to support a project - starring⭐️ the GitHub repo is just one 🙏 It really helps the project get discovered by more people.

If you do like this work, you can also support it financially on Patreon, GitHub Sponsors or Buy Me a Coffee.

Citation

Please cite deepface in your publications if it helps your research. Here is its BibTex entry:

@article{deepface,
  title     =  {Boosted LightFace: A Hybrid DNN and GBM Model for Boosted Facial Recognition},
  author    =  {Serengil, Sefik Ilkin and Ozpinar, Alper},
  journal   =  {Gazi University Journal of Science},
  volume    =  {39},
  number    =  {1},
  pages     =  {452-466},
  year      =  {2026},
  doi       =  {10.35378/gujs.1794891},
  url       =  {https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/gujs/article/1794891},
  publisher =  {Gazi University}
}

Also, if you use deepface in your GitHub projects, please add deepface in the requirements.txt.

Licence

DeepFace is licensed under the MIT License - see LICENSE for more details.

DeepFace wraps some external face recognition models: VGG-Face, Facenet (both 128d and 512d), OpenFace, DeepFace, DeepID, ArcFace, Dlib, SFace, GhostFaceNet and Buffalo_L. Besides, age, gender and race / ethnicity models were trained on the backbone of VGG-Face with transfer learning. Similarly, DeepFace wraps many face detectors: OpenCv, Ssd, Dlib, MtCnn, Fast MtCnn, RetinaFace, MediaPipe, YuNet, Yolo and CenterFace. Finally, DeepFace is optionally using face anti spoofing to determine the given images are real or fake. License types will be inherited when you intend to utilize those models. Please check the license types of those models for production purposes.

DeepFace logo is created by Adrien Coquet and it is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.