How to train a smartphone to recognise your face with a mask

 People today are often found wearing a mask as a precautionary measure to prevent themselves from getting infected by the novel coronavirus. In fact, those who show a little sign of illness are being advised to wear a face mask to help contain the virus spread.

While wearing a face mask comes with health benefits, it jeopardises our smartphone’s face unlock feature which was preconfigured to recognise our face without a mask.

Security firm Tencent Security Xuanwu Lab has highlighted that Apple’s Face ID can be trained to recognise people’s face by partially covering the face with a mast while registering the Face ID on an iPhone. And, doing this process will allow users to unlock their smartphones while wearing the mask as well as without wearing them.

Meanwhile, Android smartphones usually do not come with an advanced face recognition system like Apple Face ID and can be trained simply by wearing a mask. Although it is a hit or miss depending upon how your smartphone identifies the face, it surely did work on Samsung devices.

Now, how to train an iPhone to recognise you while wearing a mask

In order to make this trick work, first, make sure that you already have your face registered without a mask. If not, do it by heading to Settings > Face ID & Passcode

Assuming you’ve registered your face without a mask, follow the steps below

1.Open Face ID option from Settings

2.Here, you need to register an alternate appearance, so click on Set Up Alternate Appearance.

3.Now, take a mask and fold it into half and hold it in front of your face by assuming the nose centre.

4.Start registering your Face by rotating your head as we normally do, the moment, iPhone prompts ‘Face Obstructed’ start removing your mask slowly like really slowly until it says Move your head slowly to complete the circle.

5.After following the process successfully, the Face ID is now set up message will appear.

6.Now, go ahead and give it a try by wearing the mask.

Note: Xuanwu Lab has suggested that covering only the tip of the nose as covering too much of the face might not work.