There was a paper at Privacy Enhancing Technologies 03 on this topic: "Engineering Privacy in Public: Confounding Face Recognition", James Alexander and Jonathan Smith. It's full of pictures of one of the authors with various forms of facial makeup, glasses, hats, stockings (over head bank-robber style), dazzled camera with pen-light laser, etc, plus an empirical analysis of the disguise efficacy in hiding identity against I think a face recognition system called FERET. A copy seems to be online here: http://petworkshop.org/preproc/07-preproc.pdf Adam On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 01:42:58AM +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
Vnity is about as old as mankind. With vanity, various ways come to change one's appearance.
Wider lips. Narrower mouth. Wider eyes. Different shape of eyes. Name a facial feature, there is a way to enhance or suppress it.
Face-recognition systems rely on visual appearance. They typically need edges - edges of mouth, edges of eyes...; one popular algorithm for indexing a face is recognizing these points and measuring their distance. A little amount of properly applied pigment could shift these values by couple percents.
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?