New Google Leak Reveals Major Pixel Camera Biometric Upgrade

Google could bring back one of the Pixel 4’s best features for a future smartphone: a more secure and reliable version of face unlock.

Android Authority has seen documents that show the Tensor G6’s image signal processor (the chipset that will power the Pixel 11) will support an under-display infrared camera. This should mean that the Pixel 11 could authenticate your face in dark environments, which the Pixel 4 could do but no Pixel since has been able to reliably.

Currently, the Pixel 9 and Pixel 8 use the selfie camera and machine learning to authenticate your face. When Google introduced this technology to the Pixel 8, it said face unlock had the strongest level of Android biometric security (Class 3).

That means the system has a low spoof acceptance rate (SAR) of less than 7% and a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 1 in 50,000. So someone with a picture of your face, or someone who looks like you, has virtually no chance of fooling the Pixel 8 into unlocking. This makes it possible to make payments and unlock banking apps with your face on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 9.

But they don’t work in the dark because everything happens through the regular selfie camera. Read my story here, but currently, I use a mix of the fingerprint reader and face unlock depending on the time of day.

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The addition of an under-display infrared sensor could change that. The leaked documents don’t explicitly say that the Tensor G6’s new infrared abilities will be used for better biometric security, but it makes sense.

This has been an area where Android devices have fallen behind Apple, which has utilized 3D biometric security in its iPhones to authenticate faces since the iPhone 12. Google’s Pixel 4 introduced 3D face unlock but it was dropped in the Pixel 5 in the name of simpler design principles.

This news suggests that Google has found a way of maintaining a low-profile punch hole for the selfie camera, or even moving it to under the display, for the Pixel 11 while improving the face unlock technology with a combination of AI and new hardware.