Will Apple Take Facial Recognition Mobile?

By Darrell Etherington

Apple has a track record of taking products that work but haven’t yet caught on, then redesigning them with the appeal that makes them catch fire with the general buying public. The iPad is one example and Siri is another. Now there’s a new patent that suggests Apple could next tackle facial recognition.

A patent application published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Dec. 29—and spotted by Patently Apple—describes a system for presence detection that builds on two patents Apple had already filed related to the technology, but this one has a specific take aimed at use in mobile devices. Prior patents dealt with presence detection on MacBooks and with advanced recognition systems for use in processor-heavy home and business applications. This one (see graphic) combines sophistication with a light footprint for practical, everyday, mobile use.

Having used the Samsung (005930:KS) Galaxy Nexus for a while, I’m pleased to see what Apple’s new patent proposes to fix about presence detection. It describes a system in which lighting conditions, angles, and scale could all be accounted for, making face recognition usable on mobiles without strict caveats and conditions. The Galaxy Nexus’s ICS face-unlock feature is cute, but that’s about as far as it goes: It fails to match in most cases and can be fooled with a still photograph of the subject who activated the recognition feature.

Apple’s new method would use shortcuts to accurately determine who is using a device without requiring the heavy computational costs normally involved in such a process. It achieves this by ignoring facial biometrics and assessing the position of personal features to compensate for changes in subject orientation. Other advantages include a built-in feature that would evaluate a person’s level of attentiveness when using the system, which could help the system avoid being duped by still photographs.

The new patent also describes such other neat tricks as recognizing faces among family members, friends, and co-workers, then delivering different screen savers or non-secured information to those individuals. That’s a great advance for shared-use devices. It sounds as if it could eventually be used, for instance, to set varied parental restriction levels for family members who share an iPad.

Apple specifically envisions the tech for use in iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and MacBook devices. Although some patents never evolve to practical application, this one seems both useful and achievable in the next couple of years. It would decidedly add to Apple’s personal edge, in combination with its Siri assistant, and could make iOS devices even more accessible to a broader swath of the population.

What do you think? Is this the next technology in which we can expect Apple to make a good thing much better?

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Tip for Bad Guys: Burn, Don't Shred

Prize for the Darpa Shredder Challenge: $50,000

By Douglas MacMillan

To most people, 10,000 slivers of shredded paper are as good as trash. To three coders in San Francisco, they’re a challenge—especially when the jumbled mass of paper once made up five classified government documents.

The trio were not hackers trying to steal state secrets, but participants in a contest run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the government group that funds high-tech military research. In October, Darpa offered $50,000 to the first group to piece together the shredded documents or the one that made the most progress by Dec. 4. In previous Darpa tournaments, participants have been asked to build robotic cars or use the Internet to find balloons scattered across the country. The goal of the paper shredder puzzle was to unearth technologies that could be used for national security.

“I figured I know enough really damn good programmers that I could get a few people together and we might be able to win it,” says Otávio Good, the entrepreneur behind the iPhone app Word Lens, which translates foreign-language text as it’s viewed through the phone’s camera. Good and his partners, a software engineer working at Lockheed Martin and a mobile app maker, spent 600 hours combined piecing together the five shredded pages. Out of nearly 9,000 teams, theirs—which they called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.”—was the only one to complete all five puzzles, which they did with two days to spare.

Good’s team relied on a custom-built computer program to analyze the ink, tears, and other markings on the scraps to suggest possible matches, as well as guesswork. “I knew there would be crazy people to try to do it all manually and crazy people to try to automate the whole process,” says Good. “We went with an in-between approach.”

Two weeks in, Good’s team was stumped by the fourth sheet of paper, which was more of a challenge because the words were irregularly spaced and written on unlined paper. “I think everybody hit a wall on puzzle four and didn’t know what to do,” Good says. Then he happened on an article about a little-known government project: The U.S. Secret Service has been working with manufacturers of color laser printers to place tiny, imperceptible yellow dots on printed pages so that the government can track the machine that produced them. Good put the puzzle under a blue-light filter and saw the dots. “It was a breakthrough moment,” he says. “The pattern of dots is practically a map for how everything comes together.”

Good says that the team hasn’t discussed its plans for the $50,000 prize, but they’ve already gotten recognition from peers. “I think we have more programmer street cred,” he says.

The bottom line: Three Bay Area programmers used a mixture of human and computational analysis to win the Darpa Shredder Challenge.

MacMillan is a reporter for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco.

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