Apple details Face ID's learning capabilities


In a detailed technical paper, a team at Apple named the Computer Vision Machine Learning Team provide depth on its approach for Face ID. The paper provides insights on how Apple is leveraging machine learning in a manner that is contained on devices and not leveraging cloud computing.

Apple's iCloud Photo Library is a cloud-based solution for photo and video storage. However, due to Apple's strong commitment to user privacy, we couldn't use iCloud servers for computer vision computations. Every photo and video sent to iCloud Photo Library is encrypted on the device before it is sent to cloud storage, and can only be decrypted by devices that are registered with the iCloud account. Therefore, to bring deep learning based computer vision solutions to our customers, we had to address directly the challenges of getting deep learning algorithms running on iPhone.