Your iPhone's camera could one day scan a room to pick out faces

Apple is reportedly working on a "revolutionary" new camera for the upcoming iPhone 8 -- and the tech giant has a new patent that might help make that system a reality.

The patent, which was first spotted by AppleInsider, reportedly came to Apple as part of its 2013 acquisition of the company behind the Xbox Kinect, PrimeSense. The filing describes a system that could use computer vision to review digital images in real time in order to detect human faces and other targeted objects.

That means the iPhone's camera might someday be able to scan a room and pick out where people are instantly.

The system described in the patent would depend on images taken by the camera and an infrared sensor to build out depth maps. Then, it would automatically select areas at different points within the image, which kind of look like separate ID windows, to check for peoples' faces using a specialized algorithm.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The functions of the system described in the new patent are relatively basic -- it doesn't describe any way to determine exactly who the camera is identifying, just that it could be used to ID when a face or some other targeted object appears in the field of view. That means it's unlikely that this particular design will directly lead to any biometric breakthroughs like those rumored for the iPhone 8. We've already seen that type of tech in systems like Windows Hello, which can identify individual users by their face to unlock a computer.

Instead, the type of tech described in this patent could wind up as a stepping stone to aid in facial detection for Apple's rumored camera system, which is purported to use a similar infrared sensor system for new features like biometric security features and augmented selfies for gaming avatars.