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Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold. I think about it like ad-blocking, something that may work i

Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold. I think about it like ad-blocking, something that may work itself into the mainstream despite it's questionable ethics.

MarkMMullin 8y ago
If the technology just stayed at facial recognition, maybe - I work on stereoscopic vision, so you'd have to change your head geometry too for my cameras if you're in parallax range..... and we're getting to the point of being able to do realtime skeletal pose analysis -- https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/camera.html https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam... So, it's an arms race :-/
- josefresco 8y ago
  Egad Batman! Thanks for the background - how would one change their head geometry? Would a prosthetic nose, or subdermal implants serve this purpose?
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    a hat and beard will probably be enough for next 20 years, after that we will probably have to resort to more advanced techniques like wigs
  - MarkMMullin 8y ago
    Probably - its an arms race after all - at this time for the stupider systems the following steps can confuse them 1 - use makeup techniques to make the nose fade into the face and don't let it get a profile view - noses are very important - a prosthetic nose probably won't help tho, cause the nose is an orientation characteristic more than an identification one 2 - eyes and the facial geometry around them are secondary, so no nose and giant movie star sunglasses adds to the machines confusion 3 - collar worn sparkle lighting directed upwards is baffling to machine - silly things keep picking up the light sparkles on the face as feature points (heh) 4 - makeup patterns based on the WW2 ship camouflage mess up geometry detection Now, all of that will defeat a simple recognizer but if the developers had a lick of sense, the system will still pop it out as anomalous. Mission impossible facial masks could certainly help, but pretty much everyone is removing the IR filters at this point and the facial thermography would be all messed up Then there's all the work going on in recognizing more than just a face - I've seen some stuff on incorporating more of the body into the recognition pattern (I've always wanted to watch one of those systems misrecognize Mitch McConnell as a turtle :-) As the available horsepower continues to expand, more of the totality of the individual can be recognized (my own accidental contribution to this is that cheap stereoscopic vision makes it a lot easier/more accurater to pick out foreground from background) At the end of the day, I think Scott McNeally had it right in the '90s - "You have no privacy. Get over it" I am of mixed minds about this stuff in public spaces, the good and bad examples are evenly distributed
  - dghughes 8y ago
    Or maybe infrared reflecting material similar to sun block. The local cancer society came to my workplace to promote skin health and one of the items was a small camera system. You put sun block on one part of your face, stuck your head in a box and a camera and screen showed the sunblock as black paint. If an IR type of material could be made you could paint geometric dazzle type paint on your face to obscure its geometry.
    - MarkMMullin 8y ago
      Slick idea - I'd be concerned tho that, given the semi normal rough distribution of heat on the face (there's a reason head wounds bleed so much) that this attempt to game the system would be easily detected as gaming the system. The good news is any idiots building a product by bolting together parts from OpenCV that they barely understand would probably fall for it. Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous. HOWEVER - if you were really really good and accurate with the application of the blocker (cause if its zinc oxide it does work in both directions) and you backed it up with makeup for the visible light side of the house, you probably could fool most by establishing a completely different facial geometry. Anyway, certainly a concept worth ruminating on. :-) I think it would beat me at my imaginary best if done well. Have to find a counter, I guess.. Like gait :-)
      - toofy 8y ago
        > Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous So it sounds like these types of strategies need to be turned into fashion trends in order to make the anomalies not so anomalous?
- 8_hours_ago 8y ago
  > skeletal pose analysis ... it's an arms race I see what you did there :)
  - MarkMMullin 8y ago
    Nice catch - I was completely oblivious to it till you pointed it out, and it was an accident, I swear! Lazarus Long says punsters and practical jokers get keelhauled or staked out on anthills :-( That's no fun
gldalmaso 8y ago
The sci-fi cyberpunk genre might have accidentally/accurately predicted this trend. The artwork makes heavy use of face/head mods and accessories.
- josefresco 8y ago
  I'm glad you commented. My original commented mentioned how I thought the fashion industry might take this on. Both as a way to generate new revenue, but also a way to stay "cutting edge" aka trendy. It's one thing to wear a "face mod" because you're paranoid - it's quite another to wear one because your favorite celebrity does.
- superhuzza 8y ago
  Definitely not accidental, I seem to remember at least one of William Gibson's books mention people avoiding face recognition with masks.
monocasa 8y ago
Yep. And it's super cyberpunk. https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/
- dpflan 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing. This is excellent!
J-dawg 8y ago
> Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold Along with a corresponding explosion in legislation to prevent you from covering your face in public. It already exists in France (popularly known as the 'Burqa Ban', but I think it covers other face coverings). I'm especially curious to see how this will go down in the UK, which is increasingly authoritarian while often painfully politically correct. An ill-thought-out and ambiguous piece of law will be rushed through Parliament, with various exemptions for religious groups. The far right will become outraged about these exemptions, and stage protests. The "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" brigade will be out in force. The government will make vague statements about protecting us from terrorists. Paedophiles will definitely be mentioned at some point. Eventually there'll be farcical prosecutions of people who were just cycling to work with a pollution mask, or going to a fancy-dress party. And the police will continue to claim they're under-funded, while somehow finding the resources to pursue bullshit like this.
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  It's already illegal in many states in the US. Possibly at the local level as well. Here's the relevant law for Virginia. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/section18.2-422/ https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/secti... It's a class 6 felony, which in VA means you'll be looking at "a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than five years, or in the discretion of the jury or the court trying the case without a jury, confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both".
  - coolspot 8y ago
    > However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; It doesn't say I can't wear traditional holiday costume outside of holiday, so it should be okay to wear Halloween scary costume all year long.
    - JTbane 8y ago
      >However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; Perhaps you ought to dress up as Santa Claus when you want to rob a bank, then
0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
IR leds in a hat
dpflan 8y ago
Masks, face altering, stickers, etc. I like this research about "Adversarial Patches" - stickers that confuse image recognition systems. I imagine one may wear a display with ever changing images that are salient and confuse such systems. > Research Article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf > Video for patches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Ambitious widespread adoption of brand new badly flawed technology. China's plan with tech is looking more and more like the Great Leap Forward 2.0.
beagle3 8y ago
There is nothing ethically questionable about ad blocking. Advertisers would like you to believe that there is, and perhaps at some point in the past it arguably was. However, today [not] using an ad-blocker is as ethically questionable as having [un]protected sex with a stranger. There isn't a single ad network that does not, every now and then, dish out drive by malware.
IshKebab 8y ago
Yeah only among weirdos.
jstarfish 8y ago
I'd like to think so, but my bank already prohibits wearing sunglasses or hats indoors. They have a guard that will turn you away and everything. In the future, simply entering a store with CCTV is an opt-in for FR analytics and all that entails.

MarkMMullin 8y ago

If the technology just stayed at facial recognition, maybe - I work on stereoscopic vision, so you'd have to change your head geometry too for my cameras if you're in parallax range..... and we're getting to the point of being able to do realtime skeletal pose analysis -- https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/camera.html https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam... So, it's an arms race :-/

josefresco 8y ago
Egad Batman! Thanks for the background - how would one change their head geometry? Would a prosthetic nose, or subdermal implants serve this purpose?
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  a hat and beard will probably be enough for next 20 years, after that we will probably have to resort to more advanced techniques like wigs
- MarkMMullin 8y ago
  Probably - its an arms race after all - at this time for the stupider systems the following steps can confuse them 1 - use makeup techniques to make the nose fade into the face and don't let it get a profile view - noses are very important - a prosthetic nose probably won't help tho, cause the nose is an orientation characteristic more than an identification one 2 - eyes and the facial geometry around them are secondary, so no nose and giant movie star sunglasses adds to the machines confusion 3 - collar worn sparkle lighting directed upwards is baffling to machine - silly things keep picking up the light sparkles on the face as feature points (heh) 4 - makeup patterns based on the WW2 ship camouflage mess up geometry detection Now, all of that will defeat a simple recognizer but if the developers had a lick of sense, the system will still pop it out as anomalous. Mission impossible facial masks could certainly help, but pretty much everyone is removing the IR filters at this point and the facial thermography would be all messed up Then there's all the work going on in recognizing more than just a face - I've seen some stuff on incorporating more of the body into the recognition pattern (I've always wanted to watch one of those systems misrecognize Mitch McConnell as a turtle :-) As the available horsepower continues to expand, more of the totality of the individual can be recognized (my own accidental contribution to this is that cheap stereoscopic vision makes it a lot easier/more accurater to pick out foreground from background) At the end of the day, I think Scott McNeally had it right in the '90s - "You have no privacy. Get over it" I am of mixed minds about this stuff in public spaces, the good and bad examples are evenly distributed
- dghughes 8y ago
  Or maybe infrared reflecting material similar to sun block. The local cancer society came to my workplace to promote skin health and one of the items was a small camera system. You put sun block on one part of your face, stuck your head in a box and a camera and screen showed the sunblock as black paint. If an IR type of material could be made you could paint geometric dazzle type paint on your face to obscure its geometry.
  - MarkMMullin 8y ago
    Slick idea - I'd be concerned tho that, given the semi normal rough distribution of heat on the face (there's a reason head wounds bleed so much) that this attempt to game the system would be easily detected as gaming the system. The good news is any idiots building a product by bolting together parts from OpenCV that they barely understand would probably fall for it. Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous. HOWEVER - if you were really really good and accurate with the application of the blocker (cause if its zinc oxide it does work in both directions) and you backed it up with makeup for the visible light side of the house, you probably could fool most by establishing a completely different facial geometry. Anyway, certainly a concept worth ruminating on. :-) I think it would beat me at my imaginary best if done well. Have to find a counter, I guess.. Like gait :-)
    - toofy 8y ago
      > Me, I'd be embarrassed if I didn't tag you as anomalous So it sounds like these types of strategies need to be turned into fashion trends in order to make the anomalies not so anomalous?
8_hours_ago 8y ago
> skeletal pose analysis ... it's an arms race I see what you did there :)
- MarkMMullin 8y ago
  Nice catch - I was completely oblivious to it till you pointed it out, and it was an accident, I swear! Lazarus Long says punsters and practical jokers get keelhauled or staked out on anthills :-( That's no fun

gldalmaso 8y ago

The sci-fi cyberpunk genre might have accidentally/accurately predicted this trend. The artwork makes heavy use of face/head mods and accessories.

josefresco 8y ago
I'm glad you commented. My original commented mentioned how I thought the fashion industry might take this on. Both as a way to generate new revenue, but also a way to stay "cutting edge" aka trendy. It's one thing to wear a "face mod" because you're paranoid - it's quite another to wear one because your favorite celebrity does.
superhuzza 8y ago
Definitely not accidental, I seem to remember at least one of William Gibson's books mention people avoiding face recognition with masks.

monocasa 8y ago

Yep. And it's super cyberpunk. https://cvdazzle.com/ https://cvdazzle.com/

dpflan 8y ago
Thanks for sharing. This is excellent!

J-dawg 8y ago

> Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold Along with a corresponding explosion in legislation to prevent you from covering your face in public. It already exists in France (popularly known as the 'Burqa Ban', but I think it covers other face coverings). I'm especially curious to see how this will go down in the UK, which is increasingly authoritarian while often painfully politically correct. An ill-thought-out and ambiguous piece of law will be rushed through Parliament, with various exemptions for religious groups. The far right will become outraged about these exemptions, and stage protests. The "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" brigade will be out in force. The government will make vague statements about protecting us from terrorists. Paedophiles will definitely be mentioned at some point. Eventually there'll be farcical prosecutions of people who were just cycling to work with a pollution mask, or going to a fancy-dress party. And the police will continue to claim they're under-funded, while somehow finding the resources to pursue bullshit like this.

wilsonnb 8y ago
It's already illegal in many states in the US. Possibly at the local level as well. Here's the relevant law for Virginia. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/section18.2-422/ https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/secti... It's a class 6 felony, which in VA means you'll be looking at "a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than five years, or in the discretion of the jury or the court trying the case without a jury, confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both".
- coolspot 8y ago
  > However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; It doesn't say I can't wear traditional holiday costume outside of holiday, so it should be okay to wear Halloween scary costume all year long.
  - JTbane 8y ago
    >However, the provisions of this section shall not apply to persons (i) wearing traditional holiday costumes; Perhaps you ought to dress up as Santa Claus when you want to rob a bank, then

0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago

IR leds in a hat

dpflan 8y ago

Masks, face altering, stickers, etc. I like this research about "Adversarial Patches" - stickers that confuse image recognition systems. I imagine one may wear a display with ever changing images that are salient and confuse such systems. > Research Article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf > Video for patches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4

beenBoutIT 8y ago
Ambitious widespread adoption of brand new badly flawed technology. China's plan with tech is looking more and more like the Great Leap Forward 2.0.

beagle3 8y ago

There is nothing ethically questionable about ad blocking. Advertisers would like you to believe that there is, and perhaps at some point in the past it arguably was. However, today [not] using an ad-blocker is as ethically questionable as having [un]protected sex with a stranger. There isn't a single ad network that does not, every now and then, dish out drive by malware.

IshKebab 8y ago

Yeah only among weirdos.

jstarfish 8y ago

I'd like to think so, but my bank already prohibits wearing sunglasses or hats indoors. They have a guard that will turn you away and everything. In the future, simply entering a store with CCTV is an opt-in for FR analytics and all that entails.