deepface

In early 2020, tensorflow was the dominant deep learning framework. So, deepface was built to run on top of tensorflow. Thereafter, pytorch becomes the dominant framework for deep learning. We got many requests from community to support pytorch. In the latest release (v0.0.101), DeepFace can now run on top of PyTorch alongside TensorFlow! Users has been installing deepface as `pip install deepface` commmand and this was installing its tensorflow dependency. Now, users should install the library as `pip install deepface[tensorflow]` or `pip install deepface[pytorch]` commands to install its deep learning framework dependency. To avoid releasing breaking change, the default `pip install deepface` command will continue to install tensorflow for a while. Be appreciate it if you share your comments, feedbacks and opinions.

It's a pretty deep rabbit hole. For semantic search CLIP and cosine similarity are just fine. SmolVLM(2) mentioned by spacecadet looks interesting though. I haven't integrated face recognition myself, but [deepface] seemed pretty complete. I focused more on fast rendering in [photofield] (quick [explainer] if you're interested), but even the hacked up basic semantic search with CLIP works better than it has any right to. Vector DBs are cool, but what is cooler is writing float arrays to sqlite :) [deepface]: https://github.com/serengil/deepface [photofield]: https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield [explainer]: https://lnar.dev/blog/photofield-origins/

DeepFace is a leading open-source library for facial recognition and facial attribute analysis, and the de facto standard in Python. It wraps multiple state-of-the-art models that have reached — and even surpassed — human-level accuracy in recognizing faces. By the numbers (as of early 2025): 15,000+ stars on GitHub; ~4 million installations via pip; 800+ citations in academic papers Whether you're building a cutting-edge AI project or simply exploring facial recognition, DeepFace makes advanced capabilities accessible with just a few lines of code.

Is the tech to do facial recognition at this accuracy available to public ? Last time I checked there was deepface https://github.com/serengil/deepface/tree/master but it was far to work as well as that