Choosing a product
Should I use Liveness, Face Services, or both?
Choosing a product
iLive ships two product surfaces. Most production deployments use both, but you can adopt them independently. This page will help you decide.
The two products at a glance
Liveness
Prove a real, live person is in front of the camera. Active and passive checks, managed sessions, signed attestations.
Face Services
Detect, compare, index, and search faces. Useful for selfie-to-ID matching, deduplication, and 1:N search.
| Capability | Liveness | Face Services |
|---|---|---|
| Confirm a live human is present | Yes | No |
| Detect faces in an image | — | Yes |
| Compare two faces (1:1) | — | Yes |
| Search across many stored faces (1:N) | — | Yes |
| Managed capture UI (SDK) | Yes | Optional |
| Signed, verifiable result | Yes | — |
Decide by question
Do you need to confirm a live human is present (vs a photo, screen, or video replay)? Use Liveness. Pick active checks when you want explicit user cues, or passive checks when you want a silent, background verification.
Do you need to compare a face against a stored reference? Use Face Services — Compare. Typical shape: a selfie captured today matched against the photo on file from an ID document.
Do you need to search across many faces? Use Face Services — Collections to index reference faces, then Search by face or Search by image for 1:N lookup. Scales to millions of faces per collection.
Are you doing KYC onboarding end-to-end? Use both. Start with Liveness to confirm the user is real, then use Face Services — Compare to match their selfie to the ID photo. See the KYC onboarding guide.
Common combinations
KYC onboarding. Liveness confirms a real human; Face Services — Compare matches the live capture against the ID photo. The signed liveness result and the compare score become your audit record.
Continuous authentication. For high-value actions (large transfers, admin changes), re-run a lightweight Liveness session and compare against the enrolled reference stored in a collection. Low friction, strong assurance.
Deduplication at sign-up. Before creating a new account, search the applicant's face across your existing collection. Catches duplicate accounts, synthetic identities, and prior rejects before they land in your system. See the deduplication guide.