Apple Working on Using Face Recognition to Simplify Photo Sharing

Today, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals an invention about new facial recognition algorithms that will likely be integrated into a future version of Apple’s Photos app. The new feature will fun and convenient. They include allowing users to manually connect faces with contact details, and posting the pics to social media sites. Soon, you won’t need to painstakingly look through your contacts to share group pictures. Alternately, the user could also choose to add contact information for a face that was recognized but has no contact information.

There is a third way and that way is through an automated process that relies on facial recognition.

The system in some instances will allow recognized faces to be enclosed in a box or presented alongside icons with possible forms of communications.

Furthermore, Apple’s recent patent for digital images defines multiple techniques to recognize snaps, including facial recognition tech.

Apple has been granted a patent for its new facial recognition technology that automatically shares photographs with the subjects being captured, according to a report by Tech Crunch.

The streamlined system described in the document works as follows: users can associate their friends’ faces with entries in a phone’s contact list.

Essentially, the patented system uses facial recognition technology to identify the individuals in a photo taken on a mobile device, and facilitates the sharing of that photo with the tagged individuals based on their connected contact information. Users can thus upload a picture to a particular cloud service for facial recognition and then instantly send out shared photo alerts to all identified in the picture. (NASDAQ:FB) in the Moments app it launched this summer, which helps people distribute photos to other users.

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

Apple credits Richard Salvador and Steve Salvador as the inventors.