Apple wins the patent on 19th of January (officially granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) for the advancement of the face ID recognition using Facial Heat Map through the Occlusion detection process for facial recognition.
What is Occlusion?
Before knowing what is Occlusion you need to know the source of the word. It is came from “Occlude” which means to obstruct, block, or prevent, but in photography, it’s transmogrifies to an intriguing concept. I apologies, I'm not an photography expert. Please see the article link below from an expert if you want to know more about this.
Coming back to the Occlusion, in simple technical term the occlusion occurs if an object you are tracking is hidden or occluded by another object. Like a car that drives under a bridge. Here the problem is how it can be detected when an object disappears and reappears again.
What is Occlusion detection for facial recognition?
Here the idea described a methods and systems for face detection and recognition in images capture by a camera on a device. More particularly, the idea described herein relate to the detection and assessment of occlusion of facial features in captured images.
Occlusion of facial features may be detected and assessed in an image captured by a camera on a device. Landmark heat maps may be used to estimate the location of landmarks such as the eyes, mouth, and nose of a user's face in the captured image. An occlusion heat map may also be generated for the captured image. The occlusion heat map may include values representing the amount of occlusion in regions of the face. The estimated locations of the eyes, mouth, and nose may be used in combination with the occlusion heat map to assess occlusion scores for the landmarks. The occlusion scores for the landmarks may be used control one or more operations of the device.
In some cases, an image captured of a user during a facial recognition process (e.g., either an enrollment process or an authentication process) may include at least some occlusion of the user in the image. Occlusion of the user includes the blocking or obscuring of the user (e.g., the face of the user or some portion of the user's face) by some object (e.g., a finger, a hand, hair, masks, scarfs, etc.) in the image. Occlusion of the user in captured images may reduce the effectiveness of processing the image in the facial recognition process.
How importance this new technology is?
Now a days the in the mobile phone or other devices are locked though Biometric authentication processes and it is used more frequently to allow users to more readily access their devices without the need for passcode or password authentication. One example of a biometric authentication process is fingerprint authentication using a fingerprint sensor.
For mobile Facial recognition is another biometric process that may be used for authentication of an authorized user of a device. Facial recognition processes are generally used to identify individuals in an image and/or compare individuals in images to a database of individuals to match the faces of individuals. However, now a days due to this Covid-19, people are using face mask where face recognition is not working at all.
But once this technology is available on the phone for use this can be solved. Open the lock of your device if it heat map from your face matched with the stored image.
Is Apple is going to introduce the fingerprint sensor in iPhone 13 or they completely ruled out that option and update the face recognition with this advanced technology?
As usual there is nothing from Apple side yet. But we can predict more to come soon.
