Building a face recognition API with face_recognition, Flask and PostgreSQL

A couple of months ago I read about PimEyes a service that allows for finding images across the web that contain a matching face. There’s a little controversy behind the service because it doesn’t vet its users strictly which means that the system can be abused.

This got me thinking about how such a technology was built, as the face recognition libraries I had seen in the past required loading in images to conduct a comparison and at the scale that Pimeyes would be operating on this would be really…