Future iPhones Might Be Able to Scan Veins in Users’ Faces
Apple is believed to be working on ultrasonic fingerprint sensors that would be embedded into the glass of future iPhones, potentially allowing the company to give up on facial recognition, but a newly-discovered patent suggests that won’t be the case.
A patent called “Vein imaging using detection of pulsed radiation” describes what could be a future upgrade to Apple’s Face ID, making facial recognition substantially more accurate and harder to crack by scanning the veins on users’ faces.
Apple applied for the patent in November 2015, probably at about the same time when it started working on Face ID (Cupertino execs said they worked for approximately two years on facial recognition).
Basically, scanning blood vessels below the surface of the skin would work with IR light, just like the current implementation of Face ID, with an optical transmitter sending pulses to the face of the user. Once information is collected from the light that reflects off the veins, the iPhone can create a map of the vessels and determine whether the user should be granted access to the device or not.
Increased accuracy, nearly impossible to clone
The abstract section of the patent describes how this feature could work if ever implemented on a device like the iPhone:
“Imaging apparatus includes an image capture device, which includes an optical transmitter, which is configured to emit one or more pulses of infrared radiation toward an area containing a body surface of a living subject, and an optical receiver, which is configured to receive the pulses reflected from the body surface and to generate an output indicative of a modulation of the pulses by tissue below the body surface.
A processor is configured to generate, based on the modulation of the pulses, an image of blood vessels located beneath the body surface within the area.”
Such a method would help Apple achieve more accuracy and avoid failures of the facial recognition system that were caused by twins or crafted masks replicating the face of the owner. But as with everything in patent stage, it remains to be seen of Cupertino is indeed willing to pursue this idea and bring it to mass production.
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