This looks like something out of the James Bond gadget lab, but no, it's real. It's a new patent just won by Apple. His obsession with making devices increasingly secure has no limits. We all know that Face ID unlocking is one of the face detectors safest in the world, even more than that of many airports.
But it turns out that such facial recognition can be fooled with a very realistic 3D mask of a user, or simply if you have a very similar twin brother to the. To avoid this mistake, Apple intends to add the venous mapping of your face to Face ID. So no masks, no evil twins. What a fabric.
Apple's facial recognition is one of the safest in the world. It only has one fault in a million. You can only fool Face ID with a super realistic 3D mask of the iPhone user to unlock, or with a twin brother who is very similar.
To avoid this, Apple has just obtained the patent titled "Vein matching for difficult biometric authentication cases«. In that patent, Apple proposes that the answer is more than deep in the skin. Specifically, a few millimeters below the skin, as it suggests that veins could be used as a unique and irreproducible identifier.
While facial features can be easily copied, vein patterns they differ enormously between people, even if they are twins. Since they are also under the skin and occupy 3D space, it is also extremely difficult to create a counterfeit face that takes into account the structure of the vein without the extreme cooperation of the subject, or medically invasive maneuvers.
The idea is to capture and add the map of the veins of the face to Face ID
Scheme with the mapping of the veins included in the patent.
The system consists of creating a 3D map of the veins of a user using subepidermal imaging techniques, such as an infrared sensor in a camera that captures flood patterns and specks of infrared illuminators that illuminate the user's face.
This is somewhat similar to how Face ID works today, in that infrared light is emitted in patterns on a user's face and read by an imaging device, but Apple's patent is specific to the vein detection rather than the outside of the skin.
We will see if in the future this technique is applied in the Face ID of future Apple devices. Many are the patents granted that never come to fruition.
