Face ID maps your face with more than 30,000 infrared dots

Apple’s Face ID, introduced with the iPhone X in September 2017, builds a depth map of the user’s face by projecting “more than 30,000 invisible IR dots” from the TrueDepth camera. According to Apple, the resulting image and dot pattern “are pushed through neural networks to create a mathematical model of your face,” which is then matched on the device’s neural engine. Apple emphasized that “all of the processing is done on-device and not in the cloud,” with the face data kept in the chip’s secure enclave - an early marketing of on-device, privacy-preserving AI.