X Face
Harriet Wehrenberg
OUR FARM JOURNEYSome might say it all started with a crooked face cow. Though truly, the devotion to cheese craftsmanship and to local dairy farms began shortly after Amy Rowbottom was born to a milk making family in Maine. More >
OUR FARM TO YOUR DOORAll cheeses are handcrafted with high quality whole milk, no preservatives, and limited ingredients, and often specially cold-smoked, for the creamiest, richest flavor and texture. Shop now > Find locally >
OUR CHEESE STORYBetween visits to local dairy farms to scratch beloved cow noses, Amy is now hard at work creating a unique mix of award winning cheeses for her Crooked Face Creamery and Up North Cheese brands. More >
The face is the front of an animal's head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions.[1][2] The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affect the psyche adversely.[1]
The face is itself a highly sensitive region of the human body and its expression may change when the brain is stimulated by any of the many human senses, such as touch, temperature, smell, taste, hearing, movement, hunger, or visual stimuli.[4]
The face is the feature which best distinguishes a person. Specialized regions of the human brain, such as the fusiform face area (FFA), enable facial recognition; when these are damaged, it may be impossible to recognize faces even of intimate family members. The pattern of specific organs, such as the eyes, or of parts of them, is used in biometric identification to uniquely identify individuals.
The shape of the face is influenced by the bone-structure of the skull, and each face is unique through the anatomical variation present in the bones of the viscerocranium (and neurocranium).[1] The bones involved in shaping the face are mainly the maxilla, mandible, nasal bone and zygomatic bone. Also important are various soft tissues, such as fat, hair and skin (of which color may vary).[1]
The face changes over time, and features common in children or babies, such as prominent buccal fat-pads disappear over time, their role in the infant being to stabilize the cheeks during suckling.While the buccal fat-pads often diminish in size, the prominence of bones increase with age as they grow and develop.[1]
Visible variable features of the face other than shapes and proportions include color (paleness, sun tan and genetic default pigmentation), hair (length, color, loss, graying), wrinkles,[5][6] facial hair (e.g. beards), skin sagging,[6] discolorations[7] (dark spots,[6] freckles and eye circles[6]), pore-variabilities,[8] skin blemishes (pimples, scars, burn marks). Many of these features can also vary over time due to aging,[6][5][7] skin care, nutrition,[9][10][11][12][13][14] the exposome[15] (such as harmful substances of the general environment,[11][15] workplace and cosmetics), psychological factors,[11] and behavior (such as smoking,[15] sleep,[11] physical activity and sun damage[5][7][11]).
Mechanisms underlying these include changes related to peptides (notably collagen),[7][11] inflammation,[11][13] production of various proteins (notably elastin and other ECM proteins),[13] the structure of subcutaneous tissue,[5][7] hormones,[11] fibers (such as elastic fibers or elasticity)[7] and the skin barrier.[15]
The desire of many to look young for their age and/or attractive[6] has led to the establishment of a large cosmetics industry,[5] which is largely concerned with make-up that is applied on top of the skin (topically) to temporarily change appearance but it or dermatology also develop anti-aging products (and related products and procedures) that in some cases affect underlying biology and are partly applied preventively.[12] Facial traits are also used in biometrics[16][17] and there have been attempts at reproducible quantifications.[7][8] Skin health is considered a major factor in human well-being and the perception of health in humans.[12]
Faces are essential to expressing emotion, consciously or unconsciously. A frown denotes disapproval; a smile usually means someone is pleased. Being able to read emotion in another's face is "the fundamental basis for empathy and the ability to interpret a person's reactions and predict the probability of ensuing behaviors". One study used the Multimodal Emotion Recognition Test[27] to attempt to determine how to measure emotion. This research aimed at using a measuring device to accomplish what many people do every day: read emotion in a face.[28]
People are also relatively good at determining if a smile is real or fake. A recent study looked at individuals judging forced and genuine smiles. While young and elderly participants equally could tell the difference for smiling young people, the "older adult participants outperformed young adult participants in distinguishing between posed and spontaneous smiles".[30] This suggests that with experience and age, we become more accurate at perceiving true emotions across various age groups.
Gestalt psychologists theorize that a face is not merely a set of facial features, but is rather something meaningful in its form. This is consistent with the Gestalt theory that an image is seen in its entirety, not by its individual parts. According to Gary L. Allen, people adapted to respond more to faces during evolution as the natural result of being a social species. Allen suggests that the purpose of recognizing faces has its roots in the "parent-infant attraction, a quick and low-effort means by which parents and infants form an internal representation of each other, reducing the likelihood that the parent will abandon his or her offspring because of recognition failure".[31] Allen's work takes a psychological perspective that combines evolutionary theories with Gestalt psychology.
Research has indicated that certain areas of the brain respond particularly well to faces. The fusiform face area, within the fusiform gyrus, is activated by faces, and it is activated differently for shy and social people. A study confirmed that "when viewing images of strangers, shy adults exhibited significantly less activation in the fusiform gyri than did social adults".[32] Furthermore, particular areas respond more to a face that is considered attractive, as seen in another study: "Facial beauty evokes a widely distributed neural network involving perceptual, decision-making and reward circuits. In those experiments, the perceptual response across FFA and LOC remained present even when subjects were not attending explicitly to facial beauty".[33]
Cosmetic surgery can be used to alter the appearance of the facial features.[34] Maxillofacial surgery may also be used in cases of facial trauma, injury to the face and skin diseases. Severely disfigured individuals have recently received full face transplants and partial transplants of skin and muscle tissue.[35]
By extension, anything which is the forward or world-facing part of a system which has internal structure is considered its "face", like the faade of a building. For example, a public relations or press officer might be called the "face" of the organization he or she represents. "Face" is also used metaphorically in a sociological context to refer to reputation or standing in society, particularly Chinese society,[37] and is spoken of as a resource which can be won or lost. Because of the association with individuality, the anonymous person is sometimes referred to as "faceless".
The Azure AI Face service provides AI algorithms that detect, recognize, and analyze human faces in images. Facial recognition software is important in many different scenarios, such as identification, touchless access control, and face blurring for privacy.
Face service access is limited based on eligibility and usage criteria in order to support our Responsible AI principles. Face service is only available to Microsoft managed customers and partners. Use the Face Recognition intake form to apply for access. For more information, see the Face limited access page.
Liveness detection: Liveness detection is an anti-spoofing feature that checks whether a user is physically present in front of the camera. It's used to prevent spoofing attacks using a printed photo, video, or a 3D mask of the user's face. Liveness tutorial
On June 11, 2020, Microsoft announced that it will not sell facial recognition technology to police departments in the United States until strong regulation, grounded in human rights, has been enacted. As such, customers may not use facial recognition features or functionality included in Azure Services, such as Face or Video Indexer, if a customer is, or is allowing use of such services by or for, a police department in the United States. When you create a new Face resource, you must acknowledge and agree in the Azure Portal that you will not use the service by or for a police department in the United States and that you have reviewed the Responsible AI documentation and will use this service in accordance with it.
Face detection is required as a first step in all the other scenarios. The Detect API detects human faces in an image and returns the rectangle coordinates of their locations. It also returns a unique ID that represents the stored face data. This is used in later operations to identify or verify faces.
Optionally, face detection can extract a set of face-related attributes, such as head pose, age, emotion, facial hair, and glasses. These attributes are general predictions, not actual classifications. Some attributes are useful to ensure that your application is getting high-quality face data when users add themselves to a Face service. For example, your application could advise users to take off their sunglasses if they're wearing sunglasses.
Microsoft has retired facial recognition capabilities that can be used to try to infer emotional states and identity attributes which, if misused, can subject people to stereotyping, discrimination or unfair denial of services. These include capabilities that predict emotion, gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair and makeup. Read more about this decision here.
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