Antisurveillance face camouflage

boing
21

And what would you do about someone with a face tattoo (other than, you know, not hire them)?

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22

probably, and maybe thatā€™s why the FBI doesnā€™t like them very much

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23

another question would be, why not just wear a baseball cap and sunglasses. obscuring the eyes is really all that needs to be done to foil facial recognition, and those 2 accessories fall within social norms.

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24

Once everyone does it, itā€™s no longer camoflauge.

25

It is, in context of people-vs-computers. The added advantage is that the camo makeup users donā€™t stand up anymore.

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26

Being a morris dancer might work as well. (itā€™s about 15 minutes into the video)

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27

Facial recognition software is designed to deal with the issues of hats and sunglasses. Theyā€™re too common to be avoided. A few years ago, I noticed my credit union had a sign up, which they enforced, saying they had a policy against wearing hats into the bank, which I find really annoying, being a bald guy who wears hats in winter and summer.

28

Being a morris dancer is going to introduce so many more problems than it would solve.

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29

Probably.

30

I think this is a good direction to take it:

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31

while they are certainly common, there is literally nothing facial recognition can do to ā€œdeal with the issueā€. the information facial recognition systems need cannot be acquired. it is physically blocked.

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32

Facial recognition software can still recognize that there is a face in the photo if youā€™re wearing a hat and sunglasses, is the point. It just canā€™t recognize if itā€™s your face. Whereas this face camouflage paint/bangs over half of your face look is meant to completely eliminate your face from being recognized as a face in automated surveillance facial capture.

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33

I see possible workarounds in 3d processing of images; acquiring multiple photos as the subject moves, reconstructing the 3d model of the face, then working with that. Any surface coloring will then be rendered moot. Theatrical latex-style makeup then will have to be used to change the actual dimensions, or sufficient mechanical occlusion of face (glasses, hat, surgical mask like Japanese use in flu seasons) will have to be deployed.

Millimeter-wave radars then can be used for peeking through the nonmetallic occlusions, but that should be defeatable with conductive fabric. Some public hysteria about the health effects of millimeter wave radars could then provide enough false targets (not mentioning the side effect of profiting from selling the ā€œhealth-preserving countermeasuresā€) to get the operators (or the computer) to yawn at detecting the countermeasure attempts as another mad tinfoilhatter.

Then there are other biometrics, e.g. gait recog, which requires a different set of countermeasuresā€¦

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34

Indeed.

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35

@doctorow recommends a handful of gravel in your shoe (in his book Little Brother).

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36

That wonā€™t work all that well, as at least some of the gait recog systems calculate the length of leg bones, inter alia, and that one stays constant even if we change the rhytms and angles. May however introduce some additional uncertainty.

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37

Close! But I saw through your trap at the last minute. You just wanted me to watch 15 minutes of Morris Dancingā€¦

38

I really donā€™t think thatā€™s the issue here. Yes, these manage to prevent consumer software from seeing that thereā€™s a face at all, but the important thing they do is prevent the software from recognizing your face.

Recognizing the existence of a face isnā€™t really all that useful to the NSA, and anyway is pretty trivial to do even with this make-up: you see that body over there with the swinging arms and legs? Just assume thereā€™s a face over it.

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39

Proposal:

Write an OpenCV application that performs face recognition (if possible by several ways), and shows the degree of match to several faces, one of which is the testerā€™s one. (Anyone here or elsewhere who has any experiences with machine vision?)

Then test different makeup styles and find what confuses the individual face-recog algorithms the most.

40

two things:

  1. facial detection and facial recognition arenā€™t quite the same thing. one is a precursor to the other.
  2. depending on the angle, the brim of the baseball cap can obscure just as much of the face from the cameraā€™s field of view as bangs can. just keep looking down.