Unlocking your Android phone might soon becomea matter of frowning, yawning or smiling. Apatent fron Google, originally filed in June 2012, enhances facial recognition by capturingseveral images of the users´s facial gestures, which should prevent some ways of cheating the “the standard” facial recognition system.

The problem with facial recognition is it´s possible to fool it by simply presenting a photo of a person to the device´s camera. However, it´s much harder to do that if the user is required to make several facial gestures to unlockthe device.

A similar feature already exist in Android Jelly Bean. It asks  users to blink after a positive face identification. With some simple image editing, however, the blinking gesture can be fooled.

Google´s new patent expands the range of available gestures to a wink, a smile, an ocular movement, a frowm, tongue protrusion and eyebrow movements needed to createthe facial expression, instead of merely using still photographs.

After capturing the gestures with the device´s camera, the system could check whether person actually made the sequence of movements needed to create the facial expression,instead of merely using still photographs.

To further increase security, the device could also ask for a series of gestures to be performed in a specific order.

As with all patents, we can´t be sure when- if ever- this technology will makeit into actual devices. However, with Google´s history of  upgrading facial recognition in Android, ever since Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich, we wouldn´t be too surprised to see it in a future iteration of the mobile OS.

Source: Mashable – http://mashable.com/2013/06/06/google-patent-facial-recognition/

editingGoogleIce Cream SandwichOS