In contrast with the rumors of Galaxy S9 featuring Apple iPhone X-like Face ID feature, a new patent by Samsung hints at a front-facing fingerprint scanner. Samsung has recently filed a patent with KIPRIS, South Korea’s trademarking organization.
If the information included in the patent documentation is accurate, the Samsung is planning on building a small recess aka notch, into the bottom of the Galaxy S9that will house a small fingerprint reader, SamMobile reports. This patent application – called Cryptic Display Apparatus and Method of Manufacturing Display Apparatus – we see a third option for the positioning of the finger scanner. The first two being at the back or under the home button. Whether it’s beautiful is of course a personal matter, but compared to the current virtual navigation keys on the Galaxy S8 duo or the Galaxy Note 8, such an implementation is less ‘clean’ as far as we are concerned. 
Until last year, the fingerprint scanner in Samsung smartphones was simply in the home button below the screen. Nice and simple. But things changed in 2017 when the full view display trend began. And because it was not feasible to place the finger scanner under the display, Samsung moved it to the back on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8, and that did upset many.
Quite off the line with this patent, a leak last week suggested Samsung to be working on its own 3D image mapping sensors, which would make a Face ID-like feature possible. Face ID is essentially Apple’s new secure authentication feature, which replaces the previously present Touch ID feature for authentication. The 3D recognition is made possible using a TrueDepth camera, which uses a setup of a dot projector, that projects and analyzes more than 30,000 invisible dots for creating a depth map of a user’s face, and an infrared camera to read the dotted pattern.