Resetting iPhone Face ID

Yesterday my iPhone 12 Pro Max stopped recognizing my face, and I had to use my passcode to access my phone. While not a huge nuisance to enter the passcode, it did remind me how convenient it is for my phone to simply recognize my face. I thought that since I have been getting older, maybe my facial features have changed enough that I needed to re-configure Face ID. Therefore, I went to Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Reset Face ID. Although I was able to clear my current Face ID settings, I had a lot of difficulty configuring a new appearance.

As you can see from the 3 photos above, the Face ID setup asked me to position my face within the frame, and despite my compliance with the request, it kept asking me to move my iPhone a little lower. I dutifully pointed the iPhone lower and lower until my face was completely out of the frame.

On a couple of occasions, Face ID accepted my face despite my face being out of frame, but Face ID logins obviously did not work. Also, when trying to turn on the “Face ID with a Mask” feature, it would attempt to verify my face and fail to do so, stating “Your face must match the existing Face ID appearance.”

Naturally my first attempt to resolve the issue was to reboot my phone. Normally I do this by simultaneously pressing the volume up and side (power) buttons, and then using the “slide to power off” slider. Then I wait a little while, press and hold the power button to restart my phone. Unfortunately the Face ID setup was still misbehaving. My next attempt to resolve the issue was to ask the internet if they have had similar problems. I found an Apple Support page called If Face ID isn't working on your iPhone or iPad Pro and did everything it suggested, but none of the recommendations solved my problem.

In some discussion forums, users reported success with erasing all content on their devices to fix the Face ID issue, but I didn’t want to resort to that until I had exhausted all other options. Finally I found a discussion thread in Apple Support Community called Face ID stopped working on my iPhone after iOS 17 update in which Allensmith98 suggested restarting my iPhone in a different way: Settings > General > Shut Down. After powering up my iPhone, I was finally able to successfully configure Face ID.

I don’t know for sure if that is the definitive way to “reset” Face ID, as some users reported success with rebooting their phones using the volume and side buttons. In any case, it appears that the TrueDepth camera that powers Apple’s Face ID technology just needed a kick in the pants.

Apple iPhoto Face Detection

I typically use Apple iPhoto for the sole purpose of storing my favorite photos and albums so that they can be synchronized to my mobile devices (e.g., iPhone, iPad).  I think the face detection feature (Faces) generally works well, and there are some common and understandable situations in which it may incorrectly identify a person, for example:

• The person is not directly facing the camera (i.e., closer to a side profile)
• The facial expression is unusual (e.g., laughing hysterically, running, squinting)
• The person is wearing a hat

Today I was importing another album into iPhoto, and another obvious reason dawned upon me--the person's face is changing!  When I starting verifying the face detection, I noticed that it kept mistakenly guessing that my daughter was her older cousin, and I had to repeatedly correct the default face detection.  I assume that Faces learns facial patterns over time and that the more data you feed it, the better it performs.  However, my observations above would suggest that Faces is not tailored toward infants and small children who are growing quickly and whose facial dimensions that are included in the face detection algorithms are changing over time.

Since I am almost certain that the folks at Apple Inc. are checking my blog on a daily basis to do market research and to understand my personal needs, I will provide a suggestion for a product enhancement: build age progression algorithms into Faces.  The folks at Merrill Edge have done it in their online retirement planning application (http://faceretirement.merrilledge.com) so I bet the Apple version would produce similar if not superior results, and its user interface would be simple and elegant.  That is, iPhoto would simply allow a user to enter a birthday or age for each facial profile, and from there it would estimate the progression of facial features over time, checking against the EXIF data in each photo to calculate the age of each candidate face at the time the photo was taken, thereby improving face detection for everyone but most notably for small children.  No more overrides of default face detection for Digital Daddy--yeah!

I don't know if this can actually be reliably done, and I'm not sure how much value this would add to applications that use face detection, but it's interesting to think about.  Either way, it is amazing to see that my little girl is growing up, and I am glad that I have captured tens of thousands of photos of her, with countless more to come.  And now, it's time for me to get back to tagging faces.