Users may soon unlock iPhone with facial recognition

Users may soon unlock iPhone with facial recognition. February. 21, 2017 07:07. by Dong-Jin Shin shine@donga.com.

There are some indications that Apply may choose facial recognition as a new way to unlock iPhone. Samsung, the biggest rival of Apple, has adopted iris recognition technology that offers heightened security in its strategic smartphones. It now remains to be seen who will lead the biometric authentication paradigm between Apple and Samsung.

Israeli financial newspaper and online media Calcalist reported on Sunday (local time) that Apple bought an Israeli facial recognition startup "RealFace" and the deal is estimated to be worth of 2 million U.S. dollars.

RealFace, founded in 2014, has continued its R&D efforts to commercialize a software that enables users to unlock their smartphones with facial recognition. One example is an application that automatically choosing the user’s best photos that they took and saved on their devices. RealFace also has a facial recognition technology that can be used to authenticate users for logging in, instead of entering passwords.

Apple has acquired PrimeSense in 2013, Emotient in 2014 and other companies with facial recognition technology. Apple popularized biometric recognition technology by adopting a fingerprint scanner as a feature of its iPhone 5S in September 2013. It seems that securing facial recognition technology is Apple’s strategy to shift paradigms in an era of biometric authentication. Facial recognition is considered as the most natural way of authentication that users can easily use, rather than fingerprint or iris.