Free — 100% on your machine, $0, fully private. A local cascade where each step only fills the gaps the previous one left:
- Faces — the local ArcFace GPU server (
/proxy/arcface, CUDA) when it's running, otherwise the in-browser Human model.
- People / bodies — YOLO person detector (catches back-views that faces miss).
- Appearance — CLIP image embeddings (clothing & scene similarity).
- Body re-ID — OSNet re-identifies the same person across frames, even from behind.
- Folder closure — deterministic: a curated folder's releases are its roster, so a lone unmatched person must be the one remaining member.
For best free accuracy keep the ArcFace GPU server running and the re-ID model installed (watch the badges) — without them faces fall back to the slower browser model and body re-ID degrades to a coarse signature.
AI — paid Claude cloud, gaps only. Only the people the free pass could not identify are sent as per-person crops to Claude (Haiku 4.5 / Sonnet 4.6 / Opus 4.8 — your tier above). You never pay to re-confirm what local matching already nailed.
