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Clothing designed to confuse facial recognition software
- romanshrompsky 4y ago"The Manifesto Collection's intent is not to create an invisibility cloak, rather, it is to raise awareness and protect the rights of the individual wherever possible." At least they admit that it doesn't work.
- sschueller 4y agoAll this effort would be better put into lobbing for a law to outright ban/severely restrict the use of face recognition. https://reclaimyourface.eu/ https://reclaimyourface.eu/
- kolinko 4y agoEU already does that - face/gait recognition from cctv by private corps is illegal afaik
- uncletaco 4y agoThose Palazzo pants have big Kefka energy
- davideg 4y agoIn the description of the technology in the Collection section they explain that facial recognition systems mistake the patterns on the clothes for animals like dogs, giraffes, and zebras. I don't know how this technology works. Is it not possible to train a system to say "human face" or not without accidental identifications of non-humans? Edit: (And thus not be fooled by this?)
- Animats 4y agoAnd, from the other side, we have facial recognition systems resistant to being confused.[1] The more advanced systems mark those people as persons of interest.[2] Then "appearance search" tracks them.[3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRF5qSrmqEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRF5qSrmqEM [2] https://www.avigilon.com/products/ai-video-analytics/self-learning https://www.avigilon.com/products/ai-video-analytics/self-le... [3] https://www.avigilon.com/products/ai-video-analytics/appearance-search https://www.avigilon.com/products/ai-video-analytics/appeara...
- imiric 4y agoI love the initiative, but are there any... less gaudy designs?
- uncletaco 4y agoI think they have to be gaudy to fool cameras.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoI doubt this is true. I've seen adversarial version of images which are very similar to the original image. E.g. an image of a cat that has had some pixels flipped so it's classified as a dog instead.
- haha69 4y agoSomething like flipping a pixel would work if you manipulate the actual image (raw image) being fed to the software. Here it is captured via a camera and then fed to the software and I doubt pixel level details are captured by a camera
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoI don't mean literally flipping pixels, but subtle changes in the image that cause a misclassification. See this post for examples: https://pyimagesearch.com/2020/10/19/adversarial-images-and-attacks-with-keras-and-tensorflow https://pyimagesearch.com/2020/10/19/adversarial-images-and-....
- lliamander 4y agoThese clothes make me think of the markings used by butterflies and other animals to ward off predators.
- uncletaco 4y agoOr attract mates like the birds of paradise.
- cabirum 4y agoThe silly colors and patterns will instead attract the attention of people around. Another issue -- it may target specific soft/hardware combinations, but will not confuse all of them. It will probably not work against color-agnostic IR or ToF/depth cameras.
- meta-level 4y agoProjects like this make me think of arms race (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race). If I wanted my governments surveillance camera system to improve more quickly I'd confront it with some challenging training data by making an exploit public and available for everyone :)
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoEvery time there's one who will anticipate defeat and failure from the start. Every bloody time. No fighting back because it's no use we've already lost. I don't want to share a world with people like you because you've nothing positive to offer.
- LambdaComplex 4y agoLooks like stuff that Jake Sisko would wear
- rastamutta 4y agoHaha, that comment really Brings me back. Thanks!
- GeorgeRichard 4y agoI don't know anything about facial recognition software so I'm probably underestimating the difficulty of alerting the system and it's operators to the interesting possibility of giraffes and zebras wandering around the urban environment.
- fwlr 4y agoFacial recognition tech is basically two parts: detecting a face in an image (“face detection”, often this is done by calling out to OpenCV’s face detection in Python or C++), and then extracting information from that face image and searching a database with it (“facial recognition”, sometimes done with algorithmic measurement of facial features but increasingly done by neural networks). This clothing looks like it might be designed to confuse the face detection step.
- wodenokoto 4y agoThe current HN headline [0]makes it clear what this is, but the actual website makes it really difficult to understand what their value proposition is, other than “designed in Italy made from Egyptian yarn” [0] “Clothing designed to confuse facial recognition software”
- ryandrake 4y agoThe web site copy is terrible! Every sentence vaguely hints at what the product is for without outright saying it. > Cap_able offers a high-tech product that opens the debate on issues of our present that will shape our future. Cap_able wants to have an impact on society, creating awareness on contemporary issues through highly innovative design products from a technological and ethical point of view. [and even more of this] Ok, ok, but what… is… it…?
- Swenrekcah 4y agoPerhaps that’s deliberate for plausible deniability both for the seller and buyers.
- gdny 4y agoThis seems to prevent people from being detected by a generic object detector, but it doesn’t seem obvious that it will actually confuse a face detector… it might however confuse an autonomous vehicle, wouldn’t wear this in the street
- simonh 4y agoI’m not sure where you get that from. These are specifically designed to confuse face detection software. Edit: Maybe I see the cause of confusion. The videos show “person” detection, but the way these systems distinguish people from other objects is by faces. As far as I know cars don’t do that, they just detect objects and don’t care about faces, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
- gdny 4y agoAt the bottom of the « collections » page in the technology paragraph, they mention confusing the Yolo object detector into thinking you’re a giraffe with medium confidence instead of a person
- JoBrad 4y agoBut wouldn’t a car avoid a giraffe, too?
- gdny 4y agoA perfect one, sure, but in practice the car might, at best, treat it with less priority than a human in case of a difficult decision to make, and at worst, treat a « 40% confidence giraffe » as a false positive and ignore it
- codetrotter 4y agoImagine the headlines. “Man run over by car in Lower Manhattan – autonomous vehicle mistook man for a giraffe”
- doctor_eval 4y agoIronic (?) that this page comes with a cookie warning.
- jstummbillig 4y agoIs it? It being a warning and all?
- junon 4y agoThe alternative is to not use cookies at all. The fact there's a cookie warning means they're tracking usage and, assumedly, assigning you an ID to analyze your behavior on their site. Which is expressly contradictive of their "mission". Unrelated: These prices are insane.
- doctor_eval 4y agoWell it’s either ironic or cynical.
- zahma 4y agoWell with those prices, organic and fair trade cotton or not, it’s certainly not going to be “for the people.” On the net, privacy will become a luxury fewer people can afford, and that holds true with this apparel as well. Maybe others will follow suit and scale down prices, but for now I wouldn’t pay 400€ for this.
- radu_floricica 4y ago> On the net, privacy will become a luxury fewer people can afford, and that holds true with this apparel as well. I wouldn't put it like this. It's a niche product only a tiny number of people are interested in, most of them with moderate to high incomes. Of course they're going to price it like this. Anything that's liable to be mass purchased will also be mass produced at very thin margins - which in this case means more or less the same margins as ordinary clothing. tl;dr: if there was real demand, they'd be just a bit more expensive than ordinary clothes.
- jstummbillig 4y agoAnd there you have your training set
- thih9 4y ago> KNIT LONG SLEEVE HOODIE €420.00 Sale Price Isn’t that very expensive? Is their goal letting people avoid facial recognition, or is that just a marketing tactic and their goal is to maximize profits? > The algorithm on the textile hinders the object recognition software’s capabilities, causing it to not recognize the person wearing this garment. Instead, it recognizes the textile as nothing, a “zebra”, or a “giraffe”. That’s just inaccurate; it would be more accurate to say: the pattern on the textile may cause some algorithms (which ones? how often?) to misbehave.
- JoBrad 4y agoI think it’s really art, and is priced like it.
- still_grokking 4y agoWhen I hear "art" I think "scam". But maybe it's just me…
- jonplackett 4y agoEither way that would be preventing body detection not face detection. I’m pretty sure it’s going to fine your face just fine
- ecef9-8c0f-4374 4y agoCan we please stop with this? This will only train the AI and when the AI uprising begins it will already know all tricks.
- sph 4y agoIt's like saying "hackers, stop breaking secure systems, because they will create even stronger ones." Since the birth of civilization there have been rules, and people that try to break the rules. This is how it is meant to be. I welcome the future arms race between the tech priests of the AI-powered hell^Hworld, and the people that refuse to conform and do not want to be controlled by machines. Sadly, more and more people forget this site is called Hacker News, and it is rapidly getting overwhelmed by the LLM and AI fanatics. (This is my Saturday morning creative writing assignment. Don't read too much into it. But still, long live the struggle against AI.)
- imron 4y agoThe website confused my mobile phone browser.
- tianqi 4y agoThis seems to have nothing to do with face recognition, but rather misleading the AI to misidentify person as other objects in object recognition task. I like their mission, and I think the design look pretty good. My only concern is that this feature could cause self-driving vehicles to ignore the person wearing it, thus creating a serious safety issue.
- fhd2 4y agoOne might argue self-driving cars are the serious safety issue, but maybe that's a controversial take.
- enkid 4y agoOnly if you don't think human driven cars are a safety issue.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoFalse you can believe both!
- enkid 4y agoI was saying believing self driving cars is a safety issue is only controversial if you also don't believe human driven cars are a safety issue. Basically I'm saying you should believe both are a safety issue.
- amelius 4y agoLike self driving cars would drive into random art projects.
- tianqi 4y agoWhen a self driving vehicle has to decide on a direction to avoid an apparently fatal crash, driving into a random art projects could be an option.
- yantrams 4y agoI like the aesthetic - a mix of deep dream and glitchy pixel art.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoFor those who closed it because it looked like there is just a "stay tuned" video and a newsletter dialog: The video disappears and a web site appears after you dismiss the newsletter dialog. This is a really cool approach: It looks like slightly flashy but still "normal"-ish clothing, and likely actually works (by confusing the AI into thinking you're e.g. a dog). It's terrifying that they considered it necessary to get a legal opinion to state that yes, it's legal to distribute and wear this.
- ezconnect 4y agoJust wear makeup, cheaper than 420USD
- quantum_state 4y agoIt seems to be sure face recognition system would catch up with this …
- ac130kz 4y agoThe thing is, the designers of machine learning pipelines can now add these to the training sets
- janmo 4y agoYou are better off growing a beard, wearing glasses and a hat.
- fumeux_fume 4y ago> Cap_able is aimed at a cultural and technological avant-garde that wants to be an exemplary leader in raising awareness of the importance of one's rights: a means to express oneself, one's identity and the values shared within a reference community. Oh fuck off. Also whoever made that website should go to jail.
- commieneko 4y agoIt’s William Gibson’s “Ugly T-shirt” from his novel _Zero History_.
- jaclaz 4y agoSometimes I wonder how these things actually work (I am not talking of the actual cloth designs or their effectiveness, rather about how they manage to get this level of visibility). This project has been posted nearly everywhere in the last 1-2 years, they made a kickstarter asking (I believe) for US$ 5,000, and they got US$ 5,306 by 36 backers: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/capable-design/manifesto-collection-by-cap-able https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/capable-design/manifest... It was the thesis of the designer at the university, later joined by her sister as a marketer, she seemingly made a very good work at marketing, though thw whole stuff still looks more like an art project than anything else.