Facial Recognition: A Clue for Dissemblers

November 29, 2014

The idea that numerical recipes can identify a person in video footage is a compelling one. I know one or two folks involved in law enforcement who would find a reliable, low cost, high speed solution very desirable.

image image

The face on the left is a reverse engineered FR image. The chap on the right is the original Creature from the Black Lagoon. Toss in a tattoo and this Black Lagoon fellow would not warrant a second look at Best Buy on Cyber Monday.

I read “This Is What Happens When You Reverse Engineer Facial Recognition.” the internal data about an image is not a graduation photograph. The write up contains an interesting statement:

The resulting meshes were then 3D-printed, creating masks that could be worn by people, presenting cameras with an image that is no longer an actual face, yet still recognizable as one to software.

Does this statement point to a way to degrade the performance of today’s systems? A person wanting to be unrecognized could flip this reverse engineering process and create a mash up of two or more “faces.” Sure, the person would look a bit like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but today’s facial recognition systems might be uncertain about who was wearing the mask.

Stephen E Arnold, November 29, 2014

 

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