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Models and licensing

deepface.dev only exposes models and detectors that have been reviewed for the managed service. Agents and integrations should rely on GET /capabilities for the current allowlist instead of hard-coding assumptions.

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Approved backbone models

  • Facenet
  • Facenet512
  • OpenFace
  • Dlib
  • SFace
The current production default model is Facenet. The API allowlist is still authoritative through GET /capabilities, but if you need a stable baseline for smoke tests and synthetics, assume Facenet first and then confirm the live capabilities response.

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Excluded models

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VGG-Face

VGG-Face remains excluded. Its released weights are restricted to non-commercial research use and are not available on deepface.dev.

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ArcFace via InsightFace weights

ArcFace models derived from InsightFace weights may require a separate commercial license. Do not assume those weights are cleared for commercial use without explicit legal review.

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Detector guidance

The active detector allowlist is exposed through GET /capabilities. Start with the default detector unless you have measured a better fit for your input distribution. The current production default detector is opencv. deepface.dev also pre-bakes and pre-warms retinaface to reduce startup risk during cold recovery, but that warmup choice is operational only and does not change the default detector reported by GET /capabilities. When opencv cannot extract a face, the managed service may retry retinaface before returning no_face_detected. That fallback remains inside the approved detector allowlist and does not expand the commercial model surface.

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Attribute analysis

Attribute analysis is intentionally absent from the managed API. The upstream attribute stack depends on VGG-Face-based components that are not approved for commercial use in this service.

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Operational notes

Readiness and warmup are now first-class service concerns. GET /readiness reports whether the managed runtime has finished warming the approved model and detector stack. This route exists for health checks and incident diagnosis; it does not expand the commercial model surface beyond what GET /capabilities already exposes.