The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 73 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover Apple's future Face ID advancements so as to allow for partial face recognition and allowing Face ID to work better in challenging lighting conditions. All three of Apple's inventors are part of the company's Machine Learning team.

Currently Face ID processes typically reject an image for face detection (and downstream processes) if only part of a face is detected in the image. Such images are often rejected because the face detection is not reliable in detecting partial faces.

Apple's invention covers a neural network on a device that implements Face ID, which is a face detection process that captures an image using the TrueDepth camera on the device.

The face detection process may assess if a face is in the image and, if a face is detected, provide a bounding box for the face in the image. The advanced face detection process may provide face detection for any orientation of the face in the image (e.g., the face is detected regardless of the orientation of the face in the image).

Additionally, the face detection process may provide face detection for images that include either the user's entire face or only a portion of the user's face. The bounding box may also be located for an entire face or only the partial face present in the image.

Apple's patent FIG. 3 below depicts a representation of an embodiment of a processor on a device; FIG. 4 depicts a representation of an embodiment of a neural network module; FIG. 5 depicts a flowchart for an embodiment of a training process for a neural network module.

Apple's patent FIG. 7 above depicts examples of faces in training images in different orientations; FIG. 8 depicts examples of multiple faces presented to a training process with different partial portions for each of the faces.

Apple's granted patent 10,769,414 was originally filed in Q3 2018 and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office. You could review our original patent application report here for more graphics and information.

Apple was granted a second Face ID related patent today under number 10,769,415 titled "Detection of identity changes during facial recognition enrollment process." You could review this patent here.

Apple's patent FIG. 4 below depicts a flowchart of an embodiment of an image enrollment process for an authorized user of a device; FIG. 5 depicts a representation of an embodiment of a feature space with feature vectors after an enrollment process; FIG. 6 depicts a representation of an embodiment of a template space of a memory.

(Click on image to Enlarge)