New Apple Patent Reinforces iPhone 8 Facial Recognition Rumor

Apple has been granted a new patent that shows how depth map information can contribute to effective, low-processing facial detection in videos. This is another proof that Apple is definitely working on bringing facial detection and recognition technology to their smartphones, reinforcing a past rumor about iPhone 8 featuring facial recognition as biometric system #softwaremagic

Tuesday, Apple’s patent, entitled “Enhanced face detection using depth information”, was made official revealing the company’s plans regarding biometric security and more. First of all, know that when face detection occurs it simply scans a digital image for portions that could contain a face. That’s pretty straightforward in a static scene but in a dynamic one (a video), things can get complicated.

With the right software, of course it can be done accurately, but at the expense of computer power and with the risk of detecting more or less faces. This happens because the software has to sample simultaneously multiple portions of the image, all of different sizes. In this scenario, Apple thinks it has made a breakthrough. By using depth information, the company believes the sizes of the portions from the image can be scaled intelligently “according to a depth coordinate of the location that is indicated by the depth map“.

If the depth of each location is known, then only one test sample has to be processed, not several, avoiding the issue mentioned before. Are we going to see this in iPhone 8? Everything is possible, although it’s more likely that the 3D camera system mentioned by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo will work on that device. Either way, we like where Apple is headed with this.