Face detection is a computer technology being used in a variety of applications that identifies human faces in digital images. Face detection also refers to the psychological process by which humans locate and attend to faces in a visual scene. Face detection can be applied for various fields from proctoring online exams to personal safety.

In this blog post, we will implement how to detect face from a image on client side using face-api.js. We will use vanilla JS to integrate face-api.js in our web app.

Folder Structure

Here,

• models folder contain the models downloaded from face-api.js library.
• face-api.min.js from the face-api.js library's dist folder.
• index.html
• script.js contains the script to detect the face and draw the image in a new element
• And a sample image with face

Include Libraries:

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.6.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script defer src="face-api.min.js"></script>
<script defer src="script.js"></script>

Setting up HTML

<div id="main-image">
      <div style="width: 50%">
          <img src="Shadman.png" alt="" id="img1" width="500">
      </div>
      <div style="width: 50%">  
          <img id="cropped-img1" src="" alt="">
      </div>
</div>

Here, first image is the test image with a face, and the second image for the cropped image after the face detection is done.

Loading the model for face detection

// Load the model.
Promise.all([
  faceapi.nets.ssdMobilenetv1.loadFromUri('/models'),
]).then(() => {
    image1 = detectface(input1, croppedImage1);
  }
)

Only one model for detecting the face is loaded here.

Detecting the face

// Function to detect the face.
var detectface = async function (input, croppedImage){
  const output = await faceapi.detectAllFaces(input);
  detections = output[0].box;
  let res = extractFaceFromBox(input, detections, croppedImage);
  return res;
}

Drawing an image with data found after detecting face

// Function to draw image from the box data.
async function extractFaceFromBox(imageRef, box, croppedImage) {
  const regionsToExtract = [
    new faceapi.Rect(box.x, box.y, box.width, box.height)
  ];
  let faceImages = await faceapi.extractFaces(imageRef, regionsToExtract);

  if (faceImages.length === 0) {
    console.log("No face found");
  } else {

    faceImages.forEach((cnv) => {
      croppedImage.src = cnv.toDataURL();
    });
    console.log(croppedImage.src);
    return croppedImage.src;
  }
}

That's it. We have already detected face from a given image. The output should be something like this:

The code repository for this simple implementation of face-api.js can be found here.

Thanks for reading!