'Faceless Recognition System' Can Identify You Even When You Hide Your Face (vice.com) 55
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."
who is that (Score:5, Funny)
who is that masked man!!!
if only we had the this tech available in all the superhero movies...
69.6 (Score:3)
Ha Ha! (Score:1)
They'll never identify me [wikimedia.org]!
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yup correctly identified as the faceless man.
Intrepid (Score:2)
While I'm sure there are good uses this can be put to, I wonder if any of the researchers questioned whether this was really a good idea...
Now, if this system was capable of identifying the person responsible for {insert bad corporate act(s)} through the corporate veil well enough for them to be meaningfully punished, that would be incredible!
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this product is probably not veil proof. corporate or otherwise.
Pool size and scale? (Score:2)
I wonder how this works with a large pool size.
Sure, it might be able to spot "Bob Smith" in a crowd if the only data it has is several shots for "Bob Smith" and maybe 10 others. How about when it has to store data on a few thousand or million people. I think at some point accuracy goes out the window as it mistakes "Bob Smith" for any of the other million or so users it has data on.
Afterwwards to be known as ... (Score:2)
Maybe not ... (Score:4, 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.
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Facial expressions, poses and lighting become less of an issue. Turning away or looking up/down will not prevent the cheaper, newer 3d systems from getting a more correct match at around 10 million matches per second.
Thats great for any building security and anyone detected outside with a camera.
The next step is to build in tracking for any new face that should have worked, e.g. face on, good lighting. Wh
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Eg the person is logged at work in another state as their gov, mil, federal, state ID shows, should not be walking around in another state at that time. Been detected driving a car into or out of another city, walking around in another city in the past half an hour...
Been passed as a very random person far away will not be much use as the shared location tracking gets better.
Be
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Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew how to defeat gait. Just put a small pebble in your shoe. Or wear shoes that are too large, or too small. By altering your posture in subtle ways, you can vary your height by 2 inches easily. Even your apparent sex can be changed either temporarily or permanently, eliminating 50% of all possible matches in one shot.
Any system we can devise, others can devise ways of defeating. Remember those Windows 95 install screens saying that this newest system was immune to viruses? Th
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Even if they get a positive, all it will do is be positive on the identity you are displaying, not your other identity. So what? That's what you want.
Anyone in the process of transitioning from one sex to the other will at one point be maintaining 2 identities. The latest stats are 3 per 1,000. Do you see that many? No, and you probably get a lot of false positives, same as the people who were shown pictures of three XX women and three Trans women, and asked to pick out the trans - and got it wrong almost
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That's just the beginning.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty soon computers can be programmed to identify people by their behavioural norms -- such as walking gait and other body language.
Re: That's just the beginning.... (Score:3)
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why take that step backwards when you can access the mic and camera?
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In contrast, I have a really tough time
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69.6% certainty, sir. (Score:2)
That's good enough. Take the shot.
Not exactly correct (Score:2)
Look, WW II methods still work. Change clothing, reversible clothing, alter stride (the ministry of silly walks was actually based on real deep cover training), dazzle face paint, minor changes in cheeks, nose, chin, etc.
They just want you to think they can spot you.
And, yes, hoodies work. Best are backscatter hoodies with team logos that change.
Hats also work.
Facial recognition has a high failure rate in real world ops.
Anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you a bill of goods.
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They're telling me (and everyone) to try to sell it to a few people (FB, TLAs, etc.). It's like lie detectors. They have to convince everyone it works to sell to their customers.
We Will Sell Bullshit Thing to Feed Your Paranoia (Score:2)
From Robocop: "I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209 - renovation program, spare parts for twenty-five years... Who cares if it worked or not."
Please clarify this so called "massive power..." (Score:1)
Clever, but not that useful in practice (Score:2)
91% success is impressive performance, but it maybe isn't that useful for, eg, spotting suspects on CCTV footage. For example, the London Underground carries nearly 5 million passenger journeys per day. 9% of that is 450,000. So, if we are talking false positives, nearly half a million non-suspects for humans to check every day. To put it another way, it's several non-suspects to check in every single carriage of every single train during peak times. This is why global surveillance often isn't a very good w