It seems we’re learning more and more about iOS 5 all the time – earlier we reported on a likely artificial intelligence-powered “Assistant” function in iOS 5, and now a new report claims that facial recognition APIs were recently discovered in iOS 5 beta.
The facial recognition is likely to be similar to those used by Photo Booth on Lion, and will allow developers to integrate this face tracking and facial recognition into 3rd party apps. Apple has already revealed that iOS 5 will include Photo Booth, and it is present in the iOS 5 betas for the iPad, although the iPhone does not include the app.
The claims arise from the discovery of “CIFaceFeature” and “CIDetector” APIs within the latest iOS 5 developer beta, which are reportedly very advanced APIs. The first of these can be used to track a user’s mouth and eyes, while the later is used to process those images and perform facial recognition. Further, Apple’s developer library already contains a few notes on these new APIs.
While nobody knows for certain what these new APIs might be used for in the future, there is good reason to suspect that they might bring additional abilities and effects the iPad version of Photo Booth, similar to the face-tracking effects found within Lion.
Further, a facial recognition company called Polar Rose, which Apple acquired in 2010, is reportedly playing a role in the development of these new technologies within both iOS 5 and OS X Lion.
Furthermore, 9to5Mac suspects that Apple is planning to do even more with the new facial recognition technology, which may become an important aspect of future iOS releases. There are a lot of possibilities that Apple may bring to light. There’s bound to be some 3rd party apps that make incredible use of this as well.
While nothing is known for sure about this, it does open up a lot of potential applications for both Apple and 3rd-party developers, and I am extremely excited to see how Apple and others are able to implement this! Watch the below video to see Polar Rose’s facial recognition technology in action on the Android platform:
