Cool
Nice idea.
Reverse-engineering artist busts face detection tech
Concerned about the proliferation of face recognition systems in public places, a grad student in New York is developing privacy-enhancing hacks designed to thwart the futuristic surveillance technology. Using off-the-shelf makeup and accessories such as glasses, veils, and artificial hair, Adam Harvey's master's thesis …
This topic is closed for new posts.
The face of things to come.
It's all nice and well for industry buffs to ``predict'' face recognition ``will be everywhere'', just like other (or maybe not) industry buffs ``predicted'' RFID would be everywhere, then proceeded to scam their way into passports everywhere by way of ICAO and a good solid terrorist scare, doing clear but often overlooked damage to privacy everywhere. It's still going to be a problem and another reminder we'll need to think about what we want tracked and where we would like to stay uncounted. Not-knowing is becoming harder every day, but will prove necessairy. Thus we will have to conciously choose. And this requires us the people to speak up.
This sort of thing is why pious jews and muslims both superstitiously prefer to leave things, camels, people uncounted.
On the gripping hand, good job to the OpenCV people to provide us with an open source implementation that could then be used for Adam Harvey's work, for which kudos also.
Reference
Is this a reference (Gripping hand) to "The Moat around Murcheson's Eye", aka "The Gripping Hand" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
If so, well done that man! Excelent book!
Fighting the Future of Facial Recogition
By the look of the pictures it manages this by putting the individual into a space-timer bubble, partly taking them out of this time frame and placing them into the 1980's. The 80's sphere of influence negates CCTV since the Technology was not widely installed at that time.
Ridicule is nothing to be scared of !
Woohoo !
Time to dig out the Adam Ant makeup and dance the 'prince charming' again.
Who's in with me ?
Sure Know Something!
I won't believe this system works until it's been fully tested on Gene Simmons.
Using the technology against its self
Most CCTV cameras are highly sensitive to infrared light, which is helpful since you can illuminate scenes covertly with infrared lamps. However, it shouldn't be difficult to develop face paints which look like normal skintones to us, but which reflect or absorb strongly in the near-infrared. It is also quite possible to put infrared LEDs onto spectacles, which emit strongly enough to interfere with the face-recognition systems..
As with the spray paint on number plates...
....That stops you having your number captured on camera. That will only be effective if the cameras are unmanned (in the case of the plates you are fucked as soon as a cop car with a camera sees you as it wont see your plate). It doesn't take a genious to work out that someone who can't be identified should be checked out by a real person on the ground. It also wouldn't be difficult for the camera to alert an operator to a suspicious reading.
Basing this 'theory' on open source software is all well and good but lets face it, in the real world, the most secure and advanced technology is not given out for free.
Re: Using the technology against its self
Small, bright point sources of light do a lousy job of 'jamming' CCTVs and the like. It'll work if you strap a car headlight to your hat, perhaps... nothing else is going to be really powerful enough to dazzle the camera.
During daylight hours, an IR-cut filter applied to the camera would defeat any sort of IR-camo-makeup attempt, though perhaps it might work against night-vision type cameras (though I doubt it very much).
I was about to say...
if true, the IR-blocking glasses are "dark", then realized that they are merely sensitive to IR, along with everything else. I don't think this is likely to work; if they see well in other bands, they merely install the same IR coating that I get on my glasses on their lens.
LED around the face
already been done:
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-infrared-mask-hide-face-from-cameras-201280/
ttfn
@Ru
"Small, bright point sources of light do a lousy job of 'jamming' CCTVs and the like. It'll work if you strap a car headlight to your hat, perhaps... nothing else is going to be really powerful enough to dazzle the camera."
I don't think he's talking about dazzling the camera -- rather he's suggesting that the pattern matching may rely on patches of light and dark not in the visible spectrum, so use of IR masking and/or emission would change the image that the computer sees into "not a face" without affecting the image a man looking you in the eye would see.
@Micky 1
How's that security-by-obscurity working for you? Only at the upper-ends of military tech are the encryption system themselves secret. And even there the main protection is not letting the certificates/pass-keys/whatever fall into the wrong hands.
The strongest securith (SSH, HTTPS, TrueCrypt etc) is often quite free and open. This is what makes it secure in the first place. Sure you can see how it hashes its bits and what have you - does you sod all good when you don't have the keys.
Most advances in this area come from sponsored academic research and, with few exceptions, academics publish their research publiclly (they kinda have to). So even if you can't get access to "Code Cypher X", the theory on how it will work is out there. And if "Code Cypher X" has a flaw, a smart person can still figure out how to break it. Just look at how long HDTV security lasted, to pick one example.
I put it to you that, barring extreme cases in military-style applications, the most secure systems run on open code. With keys held safely.
face paint
They'll just make it an offence to wear detection avoiding face paint, like it's illegal to have a car number plate that reflects the GATSO flash.
Adam Ant or Itt Addams?
She could've tried the Adams Family Cousin Itt look.
Fair Game for Strip Search
Anyone wearing makeup as shown is clearly acting guilty and is fair game to be taken aside for special searches.
re: fair game
Most likely you are correct, that is what the authorities will think and that is what most normal people will believe as well.
Personally, I'm amazed that a ban on headgear and sunglasses is not already in place for all banks and places of commerce. YES, it would be inconvienent for some customers.
However, it's truly maddening how many times security cameras are foiled by con artists, forgers and the like by simply wearing a ballcap and looking down during the transaction. Even if you catch the person, the jury rightly throws out the positive ID because you can't see their face clearly.
Or maybe there's just a raft of check fraud and ID theft in the US...
Head gear ban
This is in place (at least the in the UK). Bank clerks will get uppity if you don't remove items obscuring the face (e.g. big hats, crash helmets). I am not sure what the rules are around face-obscuring head gear worn for cultural or religious reasons.
IMHO the should be removed as well.
re: fair game
What's a check?
Ah, that's the thing the banks are phasing out in the UK because nobody uses them. Yes, check fraud is probably more of a problem in the US than the UK. :|
So to defeat Face Recognition
All you have to do is make yourself up Like Adam Ant or wear a balaclava / Hijab?
Excellent
Double standards
Balaklava will get you the armed response unit from the local police station
A full Burka (not even a hijab) which obscures all of you will get you an appreciation for being a valued customer with religious rights.
WTF... I really wish they allowed Sikhs to carry their f*** pocket knifes. That would have given everyone the right to declare themselves a follower of Odin, put on a chainmail and openly carry a battle axe. In the name of Valhalla, that would have done wonders to make the tube and commuter trains a more polite environment.
I wonder how...
... Dean and Nigel would do:
www.deanandnigel.co.uk
Yeahhh...nice idea.
One tiny problem that I can see with this.
Given that the point is to hide your identity from the Man you'll proabably attract a signiificant amount of attention walking round in that get up.
Not really conducive to surreptious operation.
That is until we all start wearing it.
And I can just picture a 50 year old builder in face paint. Nothing to do with the article, I just can.
Back to the 80s!
A lot of those looks would make you appear like Steve Strange circa '82! ( Showing my age now! )
Given face number 2 ( the Apache warpaint look! ), could we all look like Adam Ant, Prince Charming era. Brings back memories of being a daft impressionable 12 year old, raiding his mum's make-up box to try to look like one the Ants!
Before I make an even bigger plank of myself, I'll get me....
Superbowl...
Isn´t Superbowl where it is most likely to find men with their faces painted, usually in the colors of the team they support?
That can throw off a facial ID software, but it would be easy to a guard reply to "a thug using blue-white checkers in his face mugged me" situation. (any similarity is coincidental)
William Wallace and Conan wouldn´t be recognized either. Oh wait, nobody will notice a 7-ft tall, 3-ft wide Barbarian or a Scotchsman wearing kilt, wielding a Broadsword or such.
Suspect techno-scam
Think about a CCTV camera, even an HD version, scanning a crowd entering a stadium. With the wide field of view to cover the entire entrance, each face will only have a limited number of pixels. And in practice, the actual usable resolution will be worse than that. And they claim to measure various distances of features on the face. To what resolution? How many real (intelligence-bearing) bit combinations will they actually end up with? I smell techno-scam.
Now if the subjects would (one-by-one) helpfully face the camera (filling the frame with their face), then the numbers start to make sense. But even given that, the technology is being oversold, way beyond what makes any sense.
<title>
*Last time I went to a sports stadium* you had to access through a narrow turnstile, individually, rather than running through a motorway-width gap with hundreds of others. So not very difficult to have an x-megapixel camera take a pic of me as an individual from very short range.
So to avoid detection...
I simply have to walk around looking like a different member of Kiss every day?
Finally we know
.. what Alistair Darling's eyebrows are for ;^)
Yeah baby..
I love it, an excuse to draw Bladerunner replicants whilst at college...
Paris, if she's not a pleasure replicant.....
I always knew ...
... that my "Aladdin Sane" makeup kit would be useful one day
Clever
We're almost in the future!
Also I like the way he slipped Yotsuba in there
total enclosure latex body suits
Rather than everyone who is concerned about their privacy learning how to become a high class fashion grade make-up artist, how about we all just go about our daily business wearing full total enclosure latex body suits with full face masks to boot? Anyone else up for this or is this just me?
Interesting
From the point of view of strictly abstract mathematics, face recognition isn't much different from decompilation. (Think of machine instructions as vertices, and the shapes to which those vertices belong as loops and functions.)
uncc is coming; and it is going to change the world.
Hasn't this been done before?
When they first started installing the mega-expensive facial recognition systems in US airports didn't they establish that they don't really work very well to start with? Change your hat, grow a beard, don't sleep for a day or two and boom! Everyone thinks you're Lady Gaga.
Interesting stuff...
There was a short write-up in Wired a few months back, about an artist who embedded little IR lights into a hat, so that on IR CCTV, his head is just a white glow. I liked the idea, but it's not like he didn't stand out on the footage...
eh...
"Harvey's research involves the reverse engineering of OpenCV"
Hardly seems like reverse engineering if you're taking apart documented open source software.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-OpenCV-Computer-Vision-Library/dp/0596516134/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271925211&sr=8-1
Well not as challenging anyway...
"Heading for the point where we need to think..."
I think we're a bit past that.
Special offer from your local face-painter
Alladin Sane - Cool look and avoids Big Brother
Reverse engineering?
«As a starting point, Harvey's research involves the reverse engineering of OpenCV, which its creators describe as an open-source "library of programming functions for real-time computer vision." From that work, he developed an understanding of the algorithm used to tell if an image captured by a camera is, say, a car, a building or a human face.»
Wow, the guy's a genius! He reverse engineered an open-source program!
"Reverse Engineering"
"to study or analyze (a device, as a microchip for computers) in order to learn details of design, construction, and operation, perhaps to produce a copy or an improved version."
I think you (and a few others) have true "Reverse Engineering" confused with the more ill-intended aspect of it. Reverse Engineering is broader than decompiling a program. Analysing facial recognition algorithms with the intent on defeating them fully qualifies to be branded as "reverse engineering."
Seriously?
errrr. yeah, cover your face. thats one way to stay hidden...
Calendar
If you want to read some comments about this elsewhere, Bruce Schneier had a mini blog post about this a few weeks ago:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/makeup_to_fool.html
(not saying it has taken El Reg 10 days to catch up on the Brucie at all...... not at all.......)
Reverse engineering an open source library?
Why didn't he just read the source
Hmmmm
So mentioning that a pair of dark sunglasses could do it just as well justifies his "research" and theses does it?
No mention of the hoody's favourite of course which not only foils computerised systems, but also manual ones...
Honestly, where can I get a grant for such research? I have a sneaking suspicion that beer makes your legs go wobbly.
(Can we have an icon for the department of the bleedin' obvious?)
May I be the first...
...to welcome our undetectable new "New Romantic" overlords etc.
aagghh! Thanks for making me ruin my keyboard!
That is the funniest things i've read all week!
Someone quick do a graphic novel about New romantics taking over the earth and then make it into a Hollywood blockbuster - it will be like Watchmen but with more Roland Synthesizers.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Sign up, sign up for The Register's weekly IT security newsletter - click here
Popular Whitepapers
- The BI Inflexion Point
Information is a right, not a privilege - VPN security - if you want it, come and get it
Attention WiFi hotspotters: You want it - The Register Guide to iSCSI
A primer on Internet SCSI, a protocol to transport SCSI commands over IP - Secure Mobile Working
Beyond the Technology - The Impact of IT Security Attitudes
Putting the pieces in place for effective security delivery - The Register guide to unified communications
A primer on the implications of unified communications for enterprise IT
