Apple Patent Eyes Facial Recognition for Photo Sharing

Take a picture with your favorite Apple device, and there might soon come a point when the people in that photo quickly receive a copy of it thanks to facial recognition.

That’s more convenient than waiting for a friend to manually upload or publish photos to a social network. But we say “might” because this technology was discussed in an Apple patent application, and patented technology doesn’t always result in consumer products.

Still, as AppleInsider(Opens in a new window) reports, Apple’s patent covers a range of different use cases, all of which are centered around facial-recognition techniques. In one scenario, you take a photo of a group of friends, and your device’s facial-recognition setup attempts to match people in the photo to those in your Contacts list.

If it finds a match, those people could receive a copy of the photo shortly after it’s snapped. In one case, people might have a default contact type already established—like one’s phone number for a multimedia message, or an email address—and you would then only need to tap their face to pull them into a “to-be-shared-with” list. In another case, you might have to tap a person, then select which way you want to get the photo to them.

Apple’s patent also covers other ways in which one could pair contact data with facial recognition.

“Facial-recognition data can be associated with contacts in a contact database, which allows [iPhoto] to automatically tag contacts within pictures using previously trained facial-recognition data. In an example, contacts containing previously trained facial-recognition data can be synchronized, via a central server system, to a mobile device capable of taking new photos. Once synchronized, the mobile device can utilize the pre-trained facial-recognition data to recognize faces within newly taken pictures,” reads Apple’s patent application.

That should sound familiar to most Apple fans, as Photos for Mac already uses facial-recognition techniques to help organize one’s photos. Pairing one’s contact information with these photos is the next step—the key that ties the whole sharing process together.