At 05:37 PM 4/23/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote: So low-tech device a lipstick is could be a potential tool for lowering
the probability of a successful identification by face recognition. Ladies often carry many more similar "terrorist tools" in their purses.
Opinions, comments?
These reasons are largely why ear shape, ear-eye-mouth geometry, etc., have been increasingly used in face recognition schemes. It is very difficult to use makeup to modify fundamental geometries over these scales, and fundamental geometries are easy to do math on (using affine or projective geometry, for example).
While a woman may be able to change her eye appearance, her lip shape, or even her eyebrow shape, she cannot easily change the affine geometry of ear-nose-eye-chin. Men cannot do even this, lest they be considered fags, but they can of course change beard characteristics...which is why no face recognitions worth a dime to Big Brother use facial hair (or hair style in general) as a determinant.
A friend of mine is doing a lot of work with "support vector machines" as generalization of neural nets, Hopfield networks, and other learning systems. Quite amazing how hard it is to hide from such classifiers. A little bit of makeup just doesn't do it, not when these systems have been trained on hundreds of thousands of exemplars with varying amounts of eye shade, eye liner, lipstick, and facial hair alterations.
Despite the widespread municipal bans against wearing masks in public (except during Halloween), its still widely legal to wear a motorcycle helmet with faceplate in place outdoors. I've never heard of anyone hassled for wearing one when the didn't just step off a bike. steve