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 …
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 10:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 10:31 GMT Vince Lewis 1
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 11:06 GMT Dr Dan H.
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..
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 13:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Saturday 24th April 2010 17:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
@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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 13:59 GMT Ru
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).
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 16:49 GMT The Indomitable Gall
@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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:01 GMT dr2chase
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 15:21 GMT Colin_L
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...
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Saturday 24th April 2010 17:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Monday 26th April 2010 09:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:01 GMT Secretgeek
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
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....
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:14 GMT JeffyPooh
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:23 GMT LinkOfHyrule
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?
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:26 GMT Paul Hates Handles
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.
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
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...
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:29 GMT Daf L
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!
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 21:02 GMT Ammaross Danan
"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."
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Thursday 22nd April 2010 14:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
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?)
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