6 ms·

Important to note: - they still need 1000 labeled samples per identity - their network can only handle 4000 distinct identities (at 97.25% accuracy) at a time

Important to note: - they still need 1000 labeled samples per identity - their network can only handle 4000 distinct identities (at 97.25% accuracy) at a time It's still a very worrying development for online and offline privacy.

bayesianhorse 13y ago
Actually no. For one thing, this isn't exactly a stealthy or cheap thing to do. It involves datacenters full of computing resources even for 4000 identies. I also don't believe it's so much a privacy issue. If I upload pictures to facebook I actually want them to be seen by human beings. The face-recognition only helps with that. If facebook recognizes me on a picture someplace else, I actually rather want to know about it. I'm not super famous, so unexpected pictures of myself can be more of a bad thing...
- ta_fbp 13y ago
  Privacy issue is not about what you want, it's about what can be done (and often is without you knowing). Automated facial recognition is a serious privacy concern, it's not just about the slimy despicable thing facebook is. For example, in the uk where there are more cctv video feed than people to watch them, an automated facial recognition can track you around constantly. Their current automatic number plate recognition is already a serious privacy concern. Remember 7th cube's voyeur's dream[1] released in 2005? the same but with more camera now being able to identify you based on your facial features. [1]: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=16410 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=16410
  - adyus 13y ago
    This can already be done by someone who truly wants to keep an eye on you, only it takes more manpower (well, detective power). This is simply the same trend as ATMs replacing (some) bank tellers many years ago. Will it be easier to perform and abuse mass surveillance? Sure. Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes. My stance is that we can't fight progress, but we can start fighting the people bent on abusing the powers that progress bring. Identifying them is another issue (perhaps some form of facial recognition? :)
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      >Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes. Facial recognition systems can be (and are) trained to not be fooled by things like facial hair, hair changing, eyeglasses and sunglasses, hats, etc. Although it can obscure your features for sure. If someone does something really odd to try to avoid the facial recognition (I've people posting things like making your hair non-symmetrical, or just avoiding the camera in the first place) then they just train on those things too. And that person gets flagged as being really suspicious. And things like full face masks are banned in some places already.
      - adyus 13y ago
        And slowly, suspicious behavior is suppressed. This will have two effects. People who are truly suspicious for nefarious reasons will gradually stop being so. On the other hand, many will be incorrectly flagged as suspicious and harassed without reason. The trick is to strike a fair balance between the two. But who decides what's fair?
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    Wouldn't it actually be better to stop a government from doing that? If you can't, there's something wrong that no restrictions/bans on technological progresss will fix... Usually it's easier to get the government in line than to prevent some technology to be developed...
    - chroem 13y ago
      So how is that NSA reform coming along? Good I hope?
- userbinator 13y ago
  > For one thing, this isn't exactly a stealthy or cheap thing to do. That's actually the more disturbing part about this: it require computational resources that only governments and large corporations can afford, so they are the ones who gain the most from it; and it gives them more leverage over the population.
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    "Leverage" is kind of vague. It's hard to make money from large-scale abuses... And it doesn't look like the NSA for example is doing anything useful from its own perspective with the data they actually have...
    - Pwnguinz 13y ago
      "Leverage" doesn't always equate to profit (or even revenue). The "goal" of the NSA is not profit, but mass surveillance. Whereas surveillance historically has been centralized, with the onslaught of mobile devices, we now have prevalent distributed surveillance (and perhaps more so than surveillance). All the data everyone is feeding into FB/G+/Twitter/etc about their friends and acquaintances could not have been collected on such a mass scale by the NSA alone. If you're a privacy conscious individual, there's definitely reasons to be fearful of this approach to surveillance by any governmental intelligence agency.
- thinkpad20 13y ago
  > If facebook recognizes me on a picture someplace else, I actually rather want to know about it. I'm not super famous, so unexpected pictures of myself can be more of a bad thing... If all they did was notify you, that would be OK, I guess, although I'm not totally cool with it. I'm more worried about them seeing my picture and tagging it as me without my permission. I think the crux of it is that facebook is pretty much the least trustworthy, most give-an-inch-they-take-a-mile company out there as far as privacy is concerned...
timdumol 13y ago
Actually, based on my reading of the paper, it seems that they learn a representation using one data set (the one with 1000 labeled samples per identity), then use that representation to classify on other training sets (like the Labeled Faces in the Wild, which has 13,323 photos of 5,749 celebrities). In fact, from what I can tell from section 5.1, they seemed to use face pairs (and so trained on 1 sample per person, and then tested on the other sample). tl;dr: They don't need 1,000 labeled samples per identity (once done with the representation phase), and they achieved 97.25% accuracy on ~6,000 distinct identities, with only one training photo per identity.
- thatcherclay 13y ago
  I think you guys are reading different parts of the article. They present both results, supervised and unsupervised (where unsupervised uses the SFC dataset to train). They achieved 95.92% accuracy LFW with unsupervised (section 5.3) - so they can train on SFC and then classify a single image in a different domain with 95.92% accuracy. They achieved the 97.25% accuracy level was achieved as you say, when they let the pairs into the training set. But they overfit with LFW alone, and has to add an additional 100k identities with more samples (30) per identity. A very impressive measure, but not quite as good as being able to generalize with 97% accuracy from a single training photo.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    I looked hard, and could not prove they can identify a single image with that accuracy. I couldn't tell WHAT the trial protocol was. Where is that in the document?
    - apu 13y ago
      The LFW test is verification: given two faces you've never seen before, tell whether they're the same person or not. That's a much weaker test than saying "who is this?" The LFW benchmark protocol is described in the original tech report: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/lfw.pdf http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/lfw.pdf

bayesianhorse 13y ago

Actually no. For one thing, this isn't exactly a stealthy or cheap thing to do. It involves datacenters full of computing resources even for 4000 identies. I also don't believe it's so much a privacy issue. If I upload pictures to facebook I actually want them to be seen by human beings. The face-recognition only helps with that. If facebook recognizes me on a picture someplace else, I actually rather want to know about it. I'm not super famous, so unexpected pictures of myself can be more of a bad thing...

ta_fbp 13y ago
Privacy issue is not about what you want, it's about what can be done (and often is without you knowing). Automated facial recognition is a serious privacy concern, it's not just about the slimy despicable thing facebook is. For example, in the uk where there are more cctv video feed than people to watch them, an automated facial recognition can track you around constantly. Their current automatic number plate recognition is already a serious privacy concern. Remember 7th cube's voyeur's dream[1] released in 2005? the same but with more camera now being able to identify you based on your facial features. [1]: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=16410 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=16410
- adyus 13y ago
  This can already be done by someone who truly wants to keep an eye on you, only it takes more manpower (well, detective power). This is simply the same trend as ATMs replacing (some) bank tellers many years ago. Will it be easier to perform and abuse mass surveillance? Sure. Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes. My stance is that we can't fight progress, but we can start fighting the people bent on abusing the powers that progress bring. Identifying them is another issue (perhaps some form of facial recognition? :)
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    >Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes. Facial recognition systems can be (and are) trained to not be fooled by things like facial hair, hair changing, eyeglasses and sunglasses, hats, etc. Although it can obscure your features for sure. If someone does something really odd to try to avoid the facial recognition (I've people posting things like making your hair non-symmetrical, or just avoiding the camera in the first place) then they just train on those things too. And that person gets flagged as being really suspicious. And things like full face masks are banned in some places already.
    - adyus 13y ago
      And slowly, suspicious behavior is suppressed. This will have two effects. People who are truly suspicious for nefarious reasons will gradually stop being so. On the other hand, many will be incorrectly flagged as suspicious and harassed without reason. The trick is to strike a fair balance between the two. But who decides what's fair?
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  Wouldn't it actually be better to stop a government from doing that? If you can't, there's something wrong that no restrictions/bans on technological progresss will fix... Usually it's easier to get the government in line than to prevent some technology to be developed...
  - chroem 13y ago
    So how is that NSA reform coming along? Good I hope?
userbinator 13y ago
> For one thing, this isn't exactly a stealthy or cheap thing to do. That's actually the more disturbing part about this: it require computational resources that only governments and large corporations can afford, so they are the ones who gain the most from it; and it gives them more leverage over the population.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  "Leverage" is kind of vague. It's hard to make money from large-scale abuses... And it doesn't look like the NSA for example is doing anything useful from its own perspective with the data they actually have...
  - Pwnguinz 13y ago
    "Leverage" doesn't always equate to profit (or even revenue). The "goal" of the NSA is not profit, but mass surveillance. Whereas surveillance historically has been centralized, with the onslaught of mobile devices, we now have prevalent distributed surveillance (and perhaps more so than surveillance). All the data everyone is feeding into FB/G+/Twitter/etc about their friends and acquaintances could not have been collected on such a mass scale by the NSA alone. If you're a privacy conscious individual, there's definitely reasons to be fearful of this approach to surveillance by any governmental intelligence agency.
thinkpad20 13y ago
> If facebook recognizes me on a picture someplace else, I actually rather want to know about it. I'm not super famous, so unexpected pictures of myself can be more of a bad thing... If all they did was notify you, that would be OK, I guess, although I'm not totally cool with it. I'm more worried about them seeing my picture and tagging it as me without my permission. I think the crux of it is that facebook is pretty much the least trustworthy, most give-an-inch-they-take-a-mile company out there as far as privacy is concerned...

timdumol 13y ago

Actually, based on my reading of the paper, it seems that they learn a representation using one data set (the one with 1000 labeled samples per identity), then use that representation to classify on other training sets (like the Labeled Faces in the Wild, which has 13,323 photos of 5,749 celebrities). In fact, from what I can tell from section 5.1, they seemed to use face pairs (and so trained on 1 sample per person, and then tested on the other sample). tl;dr: They don't need 1,000 labeled samples per identity (once done with the representation phase), and they achieved 97.25% accuracy on ~6,000 distinct identities, with only one training photo per identity.

thatcherclay 13y ago
I think you guys are reading different parts of the article. They present both results, supervised and unsupervised (where unsupervised uses the SFC dataset to train). They achieved 95.92% accuracy LFW with unsupervised (section 5.3) - so they can train on SFC and then classify a single image in a different domain with 95.92% accuracy. They achieved the 97.25% accuracy level was achieved as you say, when they let the pairs into the training set. But they overfit with LFW alone, and has to add an additional 100k identities with more samples (30) per identity. A very impressive measure, but not quite as good as being able to generalize with 97% accuracy from a single training photo.
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  I looked hard, and could not prove they can identify a single image with that accuracy. I couldn't tell WHAT the trial protocol was. Where is that in the document?
  - apu 13y ago
    The LFW test is verification: given two faces you've never seen before, tell whether they're the same person or not. That's a much weaker test than saying "who is this?" The LFW benchmark protocol is described in the original tech report: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/lfw.pdf http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/lfw.pdf