To compare how well it works compared to OpenCV's face detector: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsK0hzcEyHI
dlib is also great at picking out facial landmarks: http://blog.dlib.net/2014/08/real-time-face-pose-estimation....
Between dlib and OpenBR, I think almost all of these usecases can be covered without commercial APIs - if you have a large enough training set.
Face Recognition is a whole another matter though.