Slashdot Mirror
Avoiding Facial Recognition of the Future
hypnosec writes "A New York-based designer has created a camouflage technique that makes it much harder for computer based facial recognition. Along with the growth of closed circuit television (CCTV) , this has become quite a concern for many around the world, especially in the UK where being on camera is simply a part of city life. Being recognized automatically by computer is something that hearkens back to 1984 or A Scanner Darkly. As we move further into the 21st century, this futuristic techno-horror fiction is seeming more and more accurate. Never fear though people, CV Dazzle has some styling and makeup ideas that will make you invisible to facial recognition cameras. Why the 'fabulous' name? It comes from World War I warship paint that used stark geometric patterning to help break up the obvious outline of the vessel. Apparently it all began as a thesis at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. It addressed the problems with traditional techniques of hiding the face, like masks and sunglasses and looked into more socially and legally acceptable ways of styling that could prevent a computer from recognizing your face. Fans of Assassin's Creed might feel a bit at home with this, as it's all about hiding in plain sight."
Add IR opaque contact lenses or eyeglasses. Otherwise a camera sensitive to IR could still locate your eyes easily using the Ghost Hunters effect.
I mean hey, if you're willing to paint your face like a zebra and wear a jellyfish wig, popping in a set of otherwise clear contacts should be nothing, right?
John
It would seem anyone running around painted this way would attract more police attention than just wearing a slouch hat. Perhaps it might be easier to just get (make) an Infrared LED Hat. Or maybe, take control of your government and vote them out until they remove the cameras.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And by that I do not mean cameras and facial recognition. I'm thinking about in games and books where the characters had strange hair and make up styles. Now, it's becoming plausible.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
How would climber's sunglasses, which normally protect the nose and shield the eyes, work for this?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
A practical application for my Warhammer 40K painting!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
V for Vendetta and Doktor Sleepless are pioneers of this. Doktor Sleepless's masks carry the added bonus of jamming all RFID tags in a limited area, letting the wearer act free.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
"Family life" was probably chose to specifically eliminate any right to privacy in Public Life.
It's all well and good until masking your identity becomes the same thing as covering up your license plate. illegal
The first step would be to stop making this easier for the government by posting and correctly tagging all those Facebook and flicker, etc, photos.
In fact, if you really want to start messing with this, get photo manipulation software, and on an entire sequence of photos stretch the nose a little, reduce the space between the nose and mouth, lengthen the chin, change the eyes a little, essentially changing all the standard measurements useful for visual identification, then "poison the well" by continuously posting these slightly altered shots up on these tracking sites and tag them appropriately. I'd personally even round robin tag them with friends names, or random ones if you don't already have a history to overcome, just to confuse the matter even more. (What, you didn't think that those pictures and info weren't available to the government, did you? They're the biggest, and free!, ID DB ever constructed)
All the other stuff, wrap around mirrored glasses that are IR/UV opaque etc will only assist in keeping them from making an easy match.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Not really, the LED hat actually has some effect for most security cameras currently in use.
And it doesn't have to be just a hat, it could be built into headphones or any other accessory close enough to the face to obscure it with glare.
Of course, anyone looking at the video feed will know that someone doesn't want to be identified due to the glare.
especially in the UK where being on camera is simply a part of city life.
The number of cameras in Britain is based on an extrapolation from a single street in London. It's not a particularly reliable figure.
Most of these cameras are privately owned. Do you really believe there's something about Britain that makes private businesses substantially more likely to employ CCTV than in other countries?
Render CCTV pretty much 100% ineffective.
Or maybe it was just ineffective anyway.
Deleted
They just wear burkas.
I read about his work a couple of years ago. He has come up with a good way to prevent a facial recognition algorithm getting "true positives", but I think to truly mess with The Man, how about my idea for a textile pattern to also generate lots of spurious "false positives": http://shacklemore.blogspot.com/2010/04/facial-recognition-camoflage.html Hopefully, if enough people wore this fabric, any real-time facial recognition algorithm would start getting CPU bound, and limited by the speed of running hundreds of database queries against it's back-end database.
I've been wanting to surround my license plate holder on my car with these IR LEDs....and see if they'd blank out my plate to the stupid speed/traffic light cameras....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's like wiggling your ears, only a bit harder. Come on, practice! You can do it!
You might want to work on shortening and lengthening your nose, too.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This look would go nicely with my tinfoil hat.
Eye patch. Wear it on a different side depending on the day of the week.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Yes, they should - because that's the way they tend to catch idiots misusing MIRTs - the pulse pattern is visible on the cameras.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
When someone cross-references a 200GB torrent of amateur porn photos with the facebook database
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Also the hairdos are a bit ridiculous. If more than a couple people do this, then wouldn't "the watchers" just flag anyone with preposterous hair for additional scrutiny?
Hey you insensitive clod, I used to wear my hair that way in the 80s!
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Maybe veils will become popular again.
I've been looking forward to decent facial recognition for decades. Especially in "cash registers." No more PINs, signatures, passwords to make up and then remember, no card swiping, bumping, etc. Heck; no cards at all in my wallet for loss or picking. Despite following "The Dead" back in the day, no, you can't steal my face. Just smile at the camera and go. Want to log in? My desktop should just follow me around wherever the nearest screen is. No more carrying a keychain (or barcode chain). My car should just recognise me and not be willing to start for anyone else without checking with me first. Same thing with the locks on my house. Tech like this is a good thing. How it gets used should be controlled and applied ethically, not just shot down with a luddite approach in the name of privacy. Go back to your shrill call to "Think of the children."
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
The disease is the out of control kleptocracy--corporations and the 1% dismantling everything good about our society. Learning different techniques to fool facial recognition software, etc, etc will only ever be used be a few while most will acquiesce. In short, it will make no difference to the trajectory of the path we're on.
The only, definitive way to put an end to all this crap is to tear down this failed system and start on America 2.0. America 1.0 got a lot of things right, and those things should be kept. But we also got some things wrong, and other things have developed that the original designers couldn't have foreseen. So let's wrest control back from the corrupt in that good old American way, non-violently if possible, by force of arms if necessary.
But sitting around, wasting time on weasel tactics like these is completely counter-productive. Let's act preemptively and use technology to destabilize the 1%, put them to flight, and make sure the crap they've been up to never happens again.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Sounds like the Ugly T-Shirt from William Gibson's _Zero History_.
Why are we linking to another site that links to the site of interest while adding nothing new? We could get all of this from the originating site; it's not like it would increase the number of people who RTFA.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
No, because glasses with a big flange at the bridge are noticeable too, and authorities would just look for those.
But if we can make it a fashion, then lots of people will have them.
Now... who on Slashdot is good at setting fashions? Oh. Dang.
A baseball cap, sunglasses, and a dust or surgical mask would cover up the nose and cheekbones. Bonus: you won't even stand out that much in a crowd as more and more people are doing this for health reasons.
You stereotypers are all the same...
Ah, the old "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" argument. Foolish, as it assumes the invasion of privacy will always be used only to increase public safety, and never for more nefarious purposes, while history suggests this will not be the case.
If you really want a good way to hide your license plate. Buy one cheap license plate cover, the kind with the acrylic cover and a fancy bezel. Pick up a couple of low power laser emitters and spread prisms. Search online for laser light plane, assemble it all into the license plate cover. Find a transparent film you can apply over the inside of the acrylic cover to filter the laser light (wouldn't want to blind anyone). Before you know it, your license plate will be a glowing rectangle on camera, but perfectly visible to the unaided eye.
If you put in some extra research on the types of cameras used, you can find the wavelengths they pick up and plan your laser purchases accordingly.
Maybe veils will become popular again.
Long before current discussions on veils became actual, Italy already passed laws to counter that. I's illegal in Italy to walk the streets unrecognisable. Wouldn't be surprised if subtle camouflage techniques all of a sudden would fall into the same category and hence would be illegal too over there. I guess we have to thank Mussolini for this.
Long before the event of Internet, registers were conceived whereby communications and stays could be documented. I once had to register for Internet access using one of these. The revision of the register I used dated 1937. I take it never changed since. Again one of the gems of Mussolini.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Use a sticking-plaster instead of makeup. Removable and faster than drawing patterns.
Imagine some fancy sticking-plaster on the face: looks like one have been slightly wounded and couldn't find the ordinary color on the shelf.
yes, stupid speed/traffic light cameras - how dare they catch you speeding* and/or running the lights**
It's harder to avoid than it sounds when you drive an 18-wheeler.
Scenario 1: You're traveling about 5 mph below the speed limit, easing through the intersection while anticipating and trying to prepare for an abrupt light change. You pass the point of no return, the point after which if you try to stop suddenly you're going to wind up stopped in the middle of the intersection (and probably no longer in line with your trailer.) The light turns yellow. You floor it and go all in, achieving a final speed that's maybe 3 mph below the speed limit. The light turns red. You should have stopped on the green, driver. You should have known.
Scenario 2: You're turning. The light you're at allows three cars to turn before it's red again. You wait patiently for 15 minutes, three cars, five minute wait, three cars, five minute wait, three cars, five minute wait... You're up, you're all the way at the edge of the line, in gear, your foot barely off the clutch, staring at the light, forcing yourself to avoid distractions and avoid even blinking. You stay wound up and ready to spring for an excruciating five minutes, it turns green, and you leap into action as fast as human reaction time permits. After you've changed one gear, the light is yellow, and by your second gear, it's red. You're running the red light in full balls on view of the camera, and there ain't a damn thing in the world you can do about it but smile while your picture is taken.
It's not like the short yellow cycle of such intersections forces trucks to run every red light 100% of the time, but it does make it impossible to avoid running red lights 100% of the time. Red light cameras suck. I think it should be mandatory that intersections with red light cameras also have those advance warning "Prepare to Stop When Flashing" signs that are basically the real yellow light for big rigs. Even that would do nothing to fix the problem with turns. I've run plenty of red lights, and I hate that. The system is broken.