Apple has filed a patent for an exciting new facial recognition technology that will make photo-sharing a lot easier. Soon, you won’t need to painstakingly look through your contacts to share group pictures. Apple will do it for you. With your permission, of course.
The facial recognition patent for photo-sharing
Most of us don’t need a DSLR to take a picture; iPhones do a fairly good job. Which means, we often end up hoarding group pictures of friends and family, with the promise of sharing it with them. The facial recognition feature proposed by Apple will make this less tedious. Apple registered the patent this February, and published it this week. The patent entitled ‘Systems and methods for sending digital images’ details a process for recognizing the people depicted in a photo, and options to communicate to these people, pulling information from an app like contacts. The patent covers pictures not only stored in the phone, but also transferred to other devices, such as a desktop computer, or a server computer over the network.
What will the facial recognition feature do?
The user interface could look something like this: The picture with the number of recognized faces with each face highlighted or in a box along with different options of communicating with them. For example, the user could choose to send the picture as an SMS, email or post to a social network, based on the information already available in the contacts. Alternately, the user could also choose to add contact information for a face that was recognized but has no contact information.
We choose from the list of recognized faces, whom to send the picture. This would use a facial recognition algorithm based on “eigenfaces”, which represents the basis of features used for identifying a particular face, and involves a method called principal component analysis. Apple isn’t new to the facial recognition technology; it already provides it in the iPhoto tool for Mac. The next step would be to sync the recognized photos to the contacts folder to allow for prompt sharing.
Could this threaten Apple’s pro-privacy stance?
Ensconced in the convenient features of this photo-sharing venture are also some troubling details. For example, Apple states that the database linking the facial recognition details with the contact information could be stored locally or in the cloud. There is also an opt-in auto uploads feature that could automatically distribute pictures to people identified. Maintaining user privacy amid the cloud syncing and auto-uploading could be challenging.
