# SightRadar — Face Recognition API

> SightRadar is a high-accuracy, multi-tenant face recognition API sold on prepaid credits (no subscription). It is drop-in compatible with AWS Rekognition — keep your existing SDK and point it at one new endpoint. Index, search, compare, and detect faces with calibrated similarity scores you set your own thresholds on.

Source: https://sightradar.com/

## What SightRadar does

Four face operations plus collection management:

- **Index** — detect every quality-gated face in a photo and store its embedding in a collection. Billed per photo processed.
- **Search** — find every photo a person appears in from a single selfie. Returns matching photo IDs ranked by similarity.
- **Compare** — measure similarity between two faces for 1:1 identity verification, with a score you threshold.
- **Detect** — locate and quality-gate faces in an image without storing anything (in-memory, not persisted).

Collections are namespaces your faces live in (for example, one collection per event). Creating a collection is free; only face operations are billable.

## Why teams pick SightRadar over AWS Rekognition

- **Drop-in compatible.** Same CreateCollection / IndexFaces / SearchFacesByImage / SearchFaces / CompareFaces / DetectFaces request and response shapes — keep your boto3 or AWS SDK code and change one endpoint.
- **Roughly half the price.** Real-time index $0.00093/photo, batch $0.00062/photo, search $0.00062/search — versus Rekognition's $0.00125/image Group-1 reference.
- **Self-serve from minute one.** Email sign-up, API key in minutes. No AWS account, no IAM, no default TPS quota to raise by support ticket.
- **A real web console.** Browse collections, run searches in a playground, see per-operation usage and exact credit cost, manage keys and webhooks.
- **Wider image support.** JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC/HEIF, TIFF, GIF, BMP decoded natively — WebP and iPhone HEIC work without pre-conversion (Rekognition takes JPEG/PNG only).

## Key facts

- Customer-facing API base URL: `https://api.sightradar.com`
- Auth: `Authorization: Bearer <api-key>`, keys formatted `frs_<prefix>_<secret>`, shown once at creation.
- Billing is PER PHOTO PROCESSED, never per face — a photo with 0 faces is a valid, charged, successful result.
- Prepaid credits only: no subscription, no auto-renewal. Merchant of Record: Dodo Payments.
- Privacy: per-tenant isolation (one account's vectors are never cross-searchable), encrypted in transit, scoped keys. Detect and compare do not persist images. Never trained on customer data, never sold.

## Start here

- Quickstart: https://sightradar.com/docs/quickstart
- API reference (OpenAPI 3.1): https://sightradar.com/docs
- Migrate from AWS Rekognition: https://sightradar.com/migrate
- Pricing & calculator: https://sightradar.com/pricing
- Compare vs Rekognition / Azure Face / Face++ / open-source: https://sightradar.com/compare
- Console / sign in: https://sightradar.com/login