Apple's new patent: a new identification method for Apple Watch?

So far, Apple has put into use two biometric identification methods - Touch ID and Face ID. Both of these biometric identification methods have had a great impact on the smartphone industry.

As one of the important accessories of Apple ecosystem, Apple Watch does not have its own biometric identification method. Earlier, it was reported that Apple intends to build a Touch ID module into the function button or crown of the next generation Apple Watch, so that Apple Watch will no longer rely on passwords to unlock.

Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a patent from Apple titled "Wearable electronic device with light field camera."

A light field camera is a camera that captures the light field information formed by the scene. In addition to recording the intensity and color of light at different positions, it also records the direction of light at different positions, while ordinary cameras can only record the intensity of light at different positions. The patent document points out that this authentication method is "using a light field camera to emit light to the back of the user's forearm, and then receiving light from near the user's wrist, and generating a light field image based on the emission of light and performing synthesis and focusing operations to construct at least one image near the wrist."

The Apple Watch can then extract a set of features from at least one image, determine whether the set of features matches a reference set of features, and authenticate the user based on the match.

The description in the patent document is relatively complicated. In simple terms, it uses a micro camera to shoot the wrist to obtain biological information corresponding to the user. Since the extracted information may come from the blood vessels in the wrist, foreign netizens call this patent Vein ID or Wrist ID.

It is worth mentioning that the name Vein ID has been used by Japan's Hitachi on laptops. Users only need to hold out their palms in front of the device, and the laptop's camera will use the ambient spectrum to automatically retrieve the information of the palm's blood vessels and complete the recognition. Apple's patent may be a similar recognition method, but the recognition location is on the wrist.