How the face filters work
MediaPipe Face Landmarker, a Google model that runs in your browser, finds 478 points on each face in 3D, including the irises, plus 52 expression scores such as how open your jaw is or how high your eyebrows are. The points are joined into a mesh of 852 triangles, and the face paint is a picture laid out on that mesh, the same way game characters are textured. WebGL draws the mesh over your face every frame, so the paint stretches when you smile, wraps around your cheeks when you turn and hides the far side of your face.
To make it look painted on rather than pasted on, each pixel of paint is shaded by the brightness of the skin under it: shadows under your nose and highlights on your forehead show through the paint. Eyes and the inside of your mouth are cut out of the mesh, so the paint never covers them.
Example: white skull paint over a cheek in shadow, with skin brightness 0.35, is drawn at 0.15 + 1.6 × 0.35 = 0.71 of full white, a light gray, while the same paint on a lit forehead at 0.6 brightness is clipped to pure white. That is why the paint keeps the shape of your face.
Expression effects, eyes, hair and backgrounds
- Open your mouth and a rainbow pours out; raise your eyebrows and hearts float up; wink for a burst of sparkles; pucker up to blow heart kisses; smile and your cheeks glow. Turn these off with the checkbox.
- Eye color tints only the iris, clipped to your eyelids, so blinking looks natural and your pupil stays dark.
- Hair color uses MediaPipe's multiclass selfie segmenter, which labels each pixel as hair, skin, clothes or background, and recolors the hair while keeping its shine.
- Background uses the selfie segmenter to separate you from the room: blur it, swap in a studio, sunset, neon grid, space scene or your own picture, make it a green screen, or remove it for a transparent PNG.
If your browser can't run the face mesh, the page falls back to the smaller YuNet detector, and the stickers, color looks and skin smoothing still work.
Filters for streams, calls and clips
- Webcam: press Start camera, pick a look, then take photos or record clips with sound. Full screen gives a clean picture you can window-capture in OBS or share in a call. For OBS, the facecam overlay is a browser source with all these effects and chat commands.
- Photo: drop a picture; every face gets the effect. Download it full size.
- Video: drop a clip and the effect is applied to every frame, keeping the sound.
Privacy
There's no app to install and nothing is uploaded: the camera feed, face points and recordings never leave your device. To hide faces instead of decorating them, use the face blur tool; to remove a background, the background remover; to turn a clip vertical, the vertical video maker.
Frequently asked questions
Are these face filters free?
Yes, with no watermark, no account and no app. They run in your web browser on a computer or phone.
Can I use face filters on Twitch, Zoom or Discord?
Open the filter in full screen and capture the window: in OBS add a Window Capture of the browser, and in calls share that window. Recording clips works right on the page.
Does it work with more than one face?
Yes. Up to four faces get face paint and stickers, in photos, videos and live.
How is the face paint so realistic?
It is drawn on a 3D mesh of your face with 478 tracked points, so it bends with your expressions and turns with your head, and it is shaded by the skin under it so your shadows and highlights show through.
Can I change my hair or eye color?
Yes. Pick a hair color and the hair finder recolors only your hair; pick an eye color and only the irises change, inside your eyelids.
Can I blur or replace my background?
Yes, with blur, strong blur, five ready-made scenes, a green screen, your own picture, or a transparent background for PNG photos.
Why does the camera say no face found?
The detector needs to see most of your face, reasonably lit, from the front or slightly to the side. Move closer to the camera or turn on a light in front of you.
Is my camera feed uploaded?
No. The face detector and the drawing run in your browser. Photos and clips are only saved when you press download.
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Sources
- Google AI Edge: MediaPipe Face Landmarker
- Grishchenko I et al. Attention Mesh: High-fidelity Face Mesh Prediction in Real-time, 2020
- Google AI Edge: MediaPipe Image Segmenter (selfie and multiclass selfie models)
- Wu W et al. YuNet: A Tiny Millisecond-level Face Detector. Machine Intelligence Research, 2023