LocalAI/docs/content/features/face-recognition.md

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LocalAI supports face recognition through the insightface backend: face verification (1:1), face identification (1:N) against a built-in vector store, face embedding, face detection, and demographic analysis (age / gender).

The backend ships two interchangeable engines under one image, each paired with a distinct gallery entry so users can pick by license and accuracy needs.

Licensing — read this first

Gallery entry	Detector + recognizer	Size	License
insightface-buffalo-l	SCRFD-10GF + ArcFace R50 + GenderAge	~326 MB	Non-commercial research only (upstream insightface weights)
insightface-buffalo-s	SCRFD-500MF + MBF + GenderAge	~159 MB	Non-commercial research only
insightface-opencv	YuNet + SFace	~40 MB	Apache 2.0 — commercial-safe

The insightface Python library itself is MIT, but the pretrained model packs (buffalo_l, buffalo_s, antelopev2) are released by the upstream maintainers for non-commercial research use only. Pick the insightface-opencv entry for production / commercial deployments.

Quickstart

Pull the commercial-safe backend (recommended for copy-paste):

local-ai models install insightface-opencv

Verify that two images depict the same person:

curl -sX POST http://localhost:8080/v1/face/verify \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "insightface-opencv",
    "img1": "https://example.com/alice_1.jpg",
    "img2": "https://example.com/alice_2.jpg"
  }'

Response:

{
  "verified": true,
  "distance": 0.27,
  "threshold": 0.35,
  "confidence": 23.1,
  "model": "insightface-opencv",
  "img1_area": { "x": 120.4, "y": 82.1, "w": 198.3, "h": 260.5 },
  "img2_area": { "x": 110.8, "y": 95.0, "w": 205.6, "h": 268.2 },
  "processing_time_ms": 412.0
}

1:N identification workflow (register → identify → forget)

This is the primary "face recognition" flow. Under the hood it uses LocalAI's built-in in-memory vector store — no external database to stand up.

1. Register known faces:

   curl -sX POST http://localhost:8080/v1/face/register \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{
       "model": "insightface-buffalo-l",
       "name": "Alice",
       "img": "https://example.com/alice.jpg"
     }'
   # → {"id": "8b7...", "name": "Alice", "registered_at": "2026-04-21T..."}
   

2. Identify an unknown probe:

   curl -sX POST http://localhost:8080/v1/face/identify \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{
       "model": "insightface-buffalo-l",
       "img": "https://example.com/unknown.jpg",
       "top_k": 5
     }'
   # → {"matches": [{"id":"8b7...","name":"Alice","distance":0.22,"match":true,...}]}
   

3. Remove a person by ID:

   curl -sX POST http://localhost:8080/v1/face/forget \
     -d '{"id": "8b7..."}'
   # → 204 No Content
   

{{% alert icon="⚠️" color="warning" %}} Storage caveat. The default vector store is in-memory. All registered faces are lost when LocalAI restarts. Persistent storage (pgvector) is a tracked future enhancement — the face-recognition HTTP API is designed to swap the backing store without changing the wire format. {{% /alert %}}

API reference

POST /v1/face/verify (1:1)

field	type	description
model	string	gallery entry name (e.g. insightface-buffalo-l)
img1, img2	string	URL, base64, or data-URI
threshold	float, optional	cosine-distance cutoff; default depends on engine
anti_spoofing	bool, optional	reserved — unused in the current release

Returns verified, distance, threshold, confidence, model, img1_area, img2_area, and processing_time_ms.

POST /v1/face/analyze

Returns demographic attributes for every detected face:

field	type	description
model	string	gallery entry
img	string	URL / base64 / data-URI
actions	string[]	subset of ["age","gender","emotion","race"]; empty = all supported

Only insightface-buffalo-l / insightface-buffalo-s populate age and gender (genderage head). insightface-opencv returns face regions with empty attributes — SFace has no demographic classifier. Emotion and race are always empty in the current release.

POST /v1/face/register (1:N enrollment)

field	type	description
model	string	face recognition model
img	string	face to enroll
name	string	human-readable label
labels	map[string]string, optional	arbitrary metadata
store	string, optional	vector store model; defaults to local-store

Returns {id, name, registered_at}. The id is an opaque UUID used by /v1/face/identify and /v1/face/forget.

POST /v1/face/identify (1:N recognition)

field	type	description
model	string	face recognition model
img	string	probe image
top_k	int, optional	max matches to return; default 5
threshold	float, optional	cosine-distance cutoff; default 0.35 (ArcFace)
store	string, optional	vector store model; defaults to local-store

Returns a list of matches sorted by ascending distance, each with id, name, labels, distance, confidence, and match (distance ≤ threshold).

POST /v1/face/forget

field	type	description
id	string	ID returned by /v1/face/register

Returns 204 No Content on success, 404 Not Found if the ID is unknown.

POST /v1/face/embed

Returns the L2-normalized face embedding vector for the detected face.

field	type	description
model	string	face model
img	string	URL / base64 / data-URI

Returns {embedding: float[], dim: int, model: string}. Dimension is 512 for the insightface ArcFace/MBF recognizers and 128 for OpenCV's SFace.

Note: the OpenAI-compatible /v1/embeddings endpoint is intentionally text-only by contract (input is a string or list of strings of TEXT to embed) — passing an image data-URI there does nothing useful. Use /v1/face/embed for image inputs.

Reused endpoint

• POST /v1/detection — returns face bounding boxes with class_name: "face"; works for both engines.

Choosing an engine

Need	Entry
Commercial product	insightface-opencv
Highest accuracy (research / demos)	insightface-buffalo-l
Edge / low-memory / research	insightface-buffalo-s

The recommended default threshold for /v1/face/verify and /v1/face/identify depends on the recognizer:

Recognizer	Cosine-distance threshold
ArcFace R50 (buffalo_l)	~0.35
MBF (buffalo_s)	~0.40
SFace (opencv)	~0.50

Pass threshold explicitly when switching engines — the per-engine default only fires when the field is omitted.

Related features

• Object Detection — generic bounding-box detection; /v1/detection works with the insightface backend too.
• Embeddings — raw vector extraction; face embeddings live in the same endpoint under the hood.
• Stores — the generic vector store powering the 1:N recognition pipeline.