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'Faceless Recognition System' Can Identify You Even When You Hide Your Face (vice.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the Guy-Fawkes-mask dept.

schwit1 quotes a report from Motherboard: By itself, the ability to instantly identify anyone just by seeing their face already creates massive power imbalances, with serious implications for free speech and political protest. But more recently, researchers have demonstrated that even when faces are blurred or otherwise obscured, algorithms can be trained to identify people by matching previously-observed patterns around their head and body. In a new paper uploaded to the ArXiv pre-print server, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrucken, Germany demonstrate a method of identifying individuals even when most of their photos are un-tagged or obscured. The researchers' system, which they call the "Faceless Recognition System," trains a neural network on a set of photos containing both obscured and visible faces, then uses that knowledge to predict the identity of obscured faces by looking for similarities in the area around a person's head and body. As for the accuracy of the system, "even when there are only 1.25 instances of the individual's fully-visible face, the system can identify an obscured face with 69.6 percent accuracy; if there are 10 instances of an individual's face, it increases to as high as 91.5 percent."

9 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. who is that by zlives · · Score: 4, Funny

    who is that masked man!!!

    if only we had the this tech available in all the superhero movies...

  2. 69.6 by turkeydance · · Score: 2

    the new number of the beast

  3. Pool size and scale? by phorm · · Score: 2

    I wonder how this works with a large pool size.
    Sure, it might be able to spot "Bob Smith" in a crowd if the only data it has is several shots for "Bob Smith" and maybe 10 others. How about when it has to store data on a few thousand or million people. I think at some point accuracy goes out the window as it mistakes "Bob Smith" for any of the other million or so users it has data on.

  4. Maybe not ... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    These are all pictures where the person was not trying to modify their appearance to be able to hide in plain sight. Temporary collagen injections (or even just some padding inside your cheeks), using tape (hidden under a wig) to raise the eyebrow arch vertically, or stretch the eyelids horizontally, some padding to give yourself dumbo ears, use of makeup to alter the appearance of facial bone structure via shading and highlighting, making the nose narrower using dabs of crazy glue to stick parts of the nasal septum together ...

    Enough differences, and the identification will fail.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  5. That's just the beginning.... by romanval · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Pretty soon computers can be programmed to identify people by their behavioural norms -- such as walking gait and other body language.

    1. Re: That's just the beginning.... by GoodNewsJimDotCom · · Score: 2

      Or their gps location of their phone.

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      God spoke to me
    2. Re:That's just the beginning.... by Solandri · · Score: 2

      Being borderline Aspergers/autistic, that's actually how I identify people - by their body shape, the way they move, and the clothes they tend to wear. I was able to identify a friend walking on the opposite side of a soccer stadium simply by the way he walked. I can usually identify people from behind as well. At a winter party, I surprised a my friends when I was able to pick out most of their jackets and coats correctly from the big pile as they were leaving.

      In contrast, I have a really tough time identifying celebrities because normally you just mostly see their face. Something as simple as changing their hairstyle or sometimes even putting on lipstick is enough to fool me into not recognizing them anymore. Likewise, if I haven't seen someone in a long time and they've changed their taste in clothes and hairstyle (or if their face has aged), I usually won't recognize them. That is, until they're insulted and start to walk away and I recognize their gait from behind.

  6. 69.6% certainty, sir. by gawdonblue · · Score: 2

    That's good enough. Take the shot.

  7. Not exactly correct by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 2

    Look, WW II methods still work. Change clothing, reversible clothing, alter stride (the ministry of silly walks was actually based on real deep cover training), dazzle face paint, minor changes in cheeks, nose, chin, etc.

    They just want you to think they can spot you.

    And, yes, hoodies work. Best are backscatter hoodies with team logos that change.

    Hats also work.

    Facial recognition has a high failure rate in real world ops.

    Anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you a bill of goods.

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    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --