Accessories to crime: Facial recog defeated by wacky paper glasses Researchers armed with some nifty algorithms and a set of paper glasses frames have found a way to trick facial recognition systems. Users can either evade being recognized – or more interestingly, impersonate another individual – with up to at least 80 per cent success rate, the researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and …
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A number of jurisdictions have laws against wearing masks for the purposes of evading identification. Something like this means that you must actually be identified rather than merely sorted by a computer AND you are not doing anything to justify questionable detention.
This is VERY welcome research.
> "you are not required to provide identification under the Constitution"
Unfortunately, the plod have a way around this. Without providing ID, and thus proof of a residence, they can make your life a misery by slapping you with vagrancy charges, thus forcing you to cough up your ID.
Well, of course they will! They will always find at least one irrational reason somewhere in the law books as I pointed to above. No point in my even trying. They've got my picture, with or without glasses, fingerprints and DNA. I am rather familiar with the police force not for criminal reasons but just talk to them as people (ditto postmen, firefighters, EMT's, ambulance workers, UPS,..., basically anyone that usually gets shitty treatment most of the time), and a security clearance from Hell. I'd be an absolute idiot to even litter let alone commit a "real" crime!
"A number of jurisdictions have laws against wearing masks for the purposes of evading identification."
Visit any optometrist in town here who on-sells "name brand designer frames", and you'll see some of their designs are not that far off.
But don't worry, if you visit the post office next door to get passport photos done, they will demand you remove your glasses before they take photos.
It seems that even what's considered ordinary glasses are enough to fool those systems.
Interestingly, I recently had to get a renewal of my passport at very short notice, so I arranged a visit to the closest passport office.
When I was being interviewed (part of the quick application process), I commented about taking glasses off for the photograph, and the interviewer said that it is acceptable to wear glasses in the photograph, as long as the eyes could be clearly seen through the lenses (i.e. no dark glasses, small or half-frames that obscured the eyes themselves, or heavy reflections off the lenses).
I went back and read the passport application, and indeed, this is what it says.
But I'm sure that the jobs-worth post-office counter people who do the pre-check would not accept a photo with glasses, though. Last time I used the post-office passport checking service for one of my children, it took me three attempts to get photographs they would accept, and that was without glasses,
I just had this in reverse. My old passport photo had me wearing glasses, and the damn automated gates almost never let me through (I think my average was about once in 6-8 attempts or so, and usually only after several seconds of pondering on it's part).
Just renewed and deliberately got my photos done sans specs. And so far (about 5-6 attempts) they've let me through every single time, usually after only a second or two deliberation.
Given I wear specs all the time, I guess my career as an evil criminal mastermind and world supervillain isn't going to be hampered by face recognition ;-)
"Get a few celebrities to start wearing them"
Like Elton John maybe?
So all we have to do to defeat enslavement when the robotic revolution comes, we just need to dress up like Mr. Potatohead and they'll never be able to recognize us.
Let's get the stuff ready: hypnotic pinwheel glasses, Spock or Yoda ears, candy lips, goofy mustaches, and we'll be set!
If humans have similar blind spots then .....
"Instructions for hiding in plain sight on Planet of the Simian Freakshow III"
(WARNING: only works in certain regions where we have engineered ingrained psychological responses, other regions remain problematic when using described procedure)
1) Print out the following frames to encircle you anterior and lateral eye sets
2) WEAR AT ALL TIMES
3) Inhabitants will mistake you for a what they call a "flaming drag queen" and behave nonchalantly
Would be interesting to see what "Dazzle" makeup would do to facial recog systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage).
Or an animal design facepaint... "Sarge, it's that cat from the last demo again"
As it would be makeup, legally it's NOT a mask so I'd like to see a prosecution system bring a case of "wearing a mask to evade identification".... "what mask, officer?"
Then the police authorities will simply follow their usual standard operating procedure and declare it arbitrarily illegal under a vague interpretation of existing laws. Then they will find someone wearing the glasses/dazzle makeup/whatever who is unsavory enough not to garner public sympathy, prosecute him, and therefore set a legal precedent to apply in the future.
This is America- the country where some towns ban baggy pants, or can legally use them as a valid reason to stop-and-frisk.
Alternatively the facial recognition neural nets will be trained to totally ignore glasses
I don't think that is possible. Glasses, by definition, cover the eyes and impact the shape of the nose, and that entire region seems to be critical in recognizing someone. Disregarding glasses means not analyzing that zone and that will likely render recognition basically impossible.
Until the day we have AI that can guess how someone looks without glasses, that is. Then we're toast.
Woah I forgot all about that. Zero Histoy was an acceptably good read. 7 years ago, already.
A Google Shufty reveals Ugliest T-Shirt is now a designer thing
I'm about to make a trip from the UK to Germany and back but I've grown something that nearly passes for a beard since I last went through an airport... I've been wondering how the automated bio-metric immigration machine will cope or if it will punt me off to deal with a real person? For that matter I also sometimes wear glasses (don't remember if they ask you to take them off for those machines?)
icon is a picture of me with a beard... never going to get that beer can through airport security though!
icon is a picture of me with a beard... never going to get that beer can through airport security though!
Beer can? I always thought it was some homeless dude sniffing some sort of largeish glue container.. After all it is the "Windows" icon!
Guess we had, different er, "misspent youth" experiences....
They'll ask you to remove them unless you're wearing them in your passport photograph.
If you are, then forget the machines and just go to the manned desk as the machine won't stand a hope in hell of recognizing you most of the time (take it from me as a frequent flyer and glasses wearer who had them on his passport photo for the last 10 years until a recent passport renewal).
Wow. I am shocked. Utterly, utterly, flabbergasted. I will never see life in the same way again.
Or ... not.
So a study finds that wearing ridiculous glasses fools some face recognition software. Software that literally cannot even hold up to a simple smile. (As evinced by all of the frowny-faced passport photos out there these days.) Next thing you know they'll tell you that growing a beard or even trimming your eyebrows (or not if you already do) might also throw off facial recognition software.
And I will be amazed. Astonished. Truly.
Once you get personalized ads stuffed up your arse while walking (rather stiff-legged) through a passenger lounge, you will not be so dismissive.
Or maybe your mug got erroneously uploaded to one of the "deplorables" databases "by error" (terror database, paedophile database, non-credit-worthy database, politically obnoxious non-progressive people database, etc..)
> Software that literally cannot even hold up to a simple smile.
Raj: So, as Hannah Montana, Miley was a world-famous pop star. But then she would take off her wig and go to school like a normal girl. Which, I don’t have to tell you, at that age, is its own headache.
Sheldon: That’s preposterous. How would she go unrecognized just by wearing a wig?
Raj: But you’re okay with Superman concealing his identity with a pair of glasses?
Sheldon: He doesn’t just put on a pair of glasses. He combs back his curlicue and affects a mild-mannered personality.
I wonder if their vaunted pixel patterns have anything to do with it. Face recognition works in large part by using light or dark areas to figure out a face is there and which parts are where. Dazzle makeup works by breaking up the light/dark areas. Take a look at the example photos. Is it possible that the glasses are simply adding light areas around the eyes and nose? Instead of magic pixel patterns, the effect may be due to simple value changes.
If so, then bright, thick-framed glasses will do it, complex pixel maps not needed.
It seems the pixel patterns just kick the neural network in exactly the right way (Fist of the North Star style -- Disclaimer: Extreme Violence) so that it ends up in another classification region with no particular reason instead of the correct region into which the other features of the image would lead it according to how it has been "trained". NNs are stupid like that.
See also Is AlphaGo Really Such a Big Deal? (formerly titled Why AlphaGo is Really Such a Big Deal), where we read (in the vicinity of the shaggy dog example image):
In actual fact, our existing understanding of neural networks is very poor in important ways. For example, a 2014 paper described certain “adversarial examples” which can be used to fool neural networks. The authors began their work with a neural network that was extremely good at recognizing images. It seemed like a classic triumph of using neural networks to capture pattern-recognition ability. But what they showed is that it’s possible to fool the network by changing images in tiny ways. For instance, with the images below, the network classified the image on the left correctly, but when researchers added to it the tiny perturbations seen in the center image, the network misclassified the apparently indistinguishable resulting image on the right.
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