A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.
A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.
Facial recognition still struggles with really bad mistakes that are always bad optics for the business that uses it. I’m amazed anyone is still willing to use it in its current form.
It’s been the norm that these systems can’t tell the difference between people of dark pigmentation if it even acknowledges it’s seeing a person at all.
Running a system with a decade long history or racist looking mistakes is bonkers in the current climate.
The catch is that its only really a problem for the people getting flagged. Then you’re guilty until proven innocent, and the only person to blame is a soulless machine with a big button that reads “For customer support, go fuck yourself”.
As security theater, its cheap and easy to implement. As a passive income stream for tech bros, its a blank check. As a buzzword for politicians who can pretend they’re forward-thinking by rolling out some vaporware solution to a non-existent problem, its on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
I’m old enough to remember when sitting Senator Ted Kennedy got flagged by the Bush Admin’s No Fly List and people were convinced this is the sort of shit that would reform the intrusive, incompetent, ill-conceived TSA. 20 years later… nope, it didn’t. Enjoy techno-hell, Brits.
I’m curious how well the systems can differentiate doppelgangers and identical twins. Or if some makeup is enough to fool it.
Facial recognition uses a few key elements of the face to hone in on matches, and traditional makeup doesn’t obscure any of those areas. In order to fool facial recognition, the goal is often to avoid face detection in the first place; Asymmetry, large contrasting colors, obscuring one (or both) eyes, hiding the oval head shape and jawline, and rhinestones (which sparkle and reflect light nearly randomly, making videos more confusing) seem to work well. But as neural nets improve, they also get harder to fool, so what works for one system may not work for every system.
CV Dazzle (originally inspired by dazzle camouflage used on some warships) is a makeup style that tries to fool the most popular facial recognition systems.
Note that those tend to obscure the bridge of the nose, the brow line, the jawline, etc… Because those are key identification areas for facial recognition.
Yeah, if we can still recognize those as faces, it’s possible for a neural net to do so as well.
But I’m talking more about differentiating faces than hiding entirely from such systems. Like makeup can be used to give the illusion that the shape of the face is different with false contour shading. You can’t really change the jawline (I think… I’m not skilled in makeup myself but have an awareness of what it can do) but you can change where the cheekbones appear to be, as well as the overall shape of the cheeks, and you can adjust the nose, too (unless it’s a profile angle).
I think the danger in trying to hide that you have a face entirely is that if it gets detected, there’s a good chance that it will be flagged for attempting to fool the system because those examples you gave are pretty obvious, once you know what’s going on.
It would be like going in to a bank with a ski mask to avoid being recognized vs going in as Mrs Doubtfire. Even if they are just trying to do banking that one time, the ski mask will attract unwanted attention while using a different face would accomplish the goal of avoiding attention.
Functional and subversive, just how I like my makeup
Relevant xkcd
You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.