Cloud computing and text mining innovator, AlchemyAPI has released its Face Detection and Recognition API, the latest offering in the AlchemyVision product line.

Utilizing deep learning technology, the Face Detection and Recognition API returns the position, age, gender, and also the identity of the people, in case of celebrities, when it is provided with an image file or a URL.

Audrey Klammer, Marketing Director, AlchemyAPI, writes in a blog announcing the public release, “Organizations across a variety of industries, such as social media monitoring and advertising, can take advantage of face detection to analyze their unstructured image data.

“This API provides the ability for applications to glean demographic data from images, which can be useful when analyzing a person’s social media habits or for analyzing which images have the highest return on investment in advertising campaigns,” she added.

Founder and CEO Elliot Turner told Derrick Harris of Gigaom that identifying popular individuals, by sifting through the net it learns and stores it in a proprietary knowledge graph developed by AlchemyAPI. After it settles on a certain list of names, another crawl goes through and searches for images by name, and disambiguates references to other people with the same name. This unsupervised approach is what allows AlchemyAPI to keep scaling up its operations. The face recognition system is capable of identifying 60,000 different celebrities.

The now 22 strong company, was founded in 2005, and according to Turner is not entertaining any acquisition invites claiming that the outfit has a long way to go.

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(Image credit: Programmable Web)