Apple sued for patent infringement on facial expression recognition

Apple was served a lawsuit for allegedly infringing on a facial expression recognition patent for messaging systems that the plaintiff claims is used in the Memoji feature in iMessage that imitates the personality and mood of the user with an emoji.

In a filing with the United States District Court Eastern District of Missouri, FaceToFace Biometrics alleges that its patent ‘Expression recognition in messaging systems’ dated to June 22, 2021, was infringed by Apple by continuing to sell iPhones and iPads in the U.S. that include iMessage with the Memoji feature. FaceToFace demands Apple to “pay damages adequate to compensate FaceToFace for Defendant’s infringement of the ‘623 Patent” from the sale of the iPhone X to iPhone 13 Pro Max and the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro, along with other infringing sales and attorney fees.

Apple’s Memoji is a feature that takes the user’s face acquired from a selfie or video sample to create a customizable emoticon that borrows features from their facial expression and can be sent through iMessage and Facetime.

In the patent listing for FaceToFace, the company details a security system that is said to protect and filter messages in a mobile messaging system with biometrics. The patent would recognize facial expressions that analyzes the user’s mood and expressions to determine whether it would present another message from the sender, customize advertisements, automatically generate an emoji correspondent to the user’s emotion, and function as gesture control.

Patently Apple describes FaceToFace as a “patent assertion entity,” or a patent troll.

 

This post was updated at 9:17pm Eatern on April 21, 2022 to correct that Everest is not affiliated with EverID and has not been named as a defendant in the Diamond Fortress lawsuit, and reflect that EverID ceased active operations and then sold its assets and liabilities in 2019, so the story has been removed.

Article Topics

Apple  |  biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  lawsuits  |  mobile biometrics  |  patents