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

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."

3 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. 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.
  3. 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.