Makeup as low-tech measure against automated face recognition?
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?
On Wednesday, April 23, 2003, at 04:42 PM, 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?
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. --Tim May "The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789
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
On Thursday, April 24, 2003, at 07:36 AM, Steve Schear wrote:
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.
With SARS, a large surgical mask covers nearly all of the identification markers. Add a pair of sunglasses or tinted eyeglasses and nearly nothing remains. However, the long-term implications are clear: computers become so cheap and cameras so ubiquitous that public movements are trackable. Many have written on this already. It's a signal detection problem, and the odds favor the trackers. (Which may cause more people to limit public purchases, to limit public shopping. Which can help crypto in private places, where the reverse of the above is the case: technology favors the person trying to hide, not the watchers. Crypto wins here.) --Tim May ""Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined." --Patrick Henry --Tim May "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler
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?
At the workshop, I talked to James about using make-up to create different lines that would be picked up, ie, a wider nose drawn in brightly. He was very skeptical. Adam On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 04:42:33AM +0100, Adam Back wrote: | 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? -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume
At 6:33 AM -0700 4/24/03, Adam Shostack wrote:
At the workshop, I talked to James about using make-up to create different lines that would be picked up, ie, a wider nose drawn in brightly. He was very skeptical.
Adam
On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 04:42:33AM +0100, Adam Back wrote: | 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
Ah, but the surgical masks made popular by the SARS outbreak will cover most of the signs. Add ear coverings for cold climates, and I suspect the accuracy will go way down. Cheers - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | Due process for all | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | used to be the | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@pwpconsult.com | American way. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
Vnity is about as old as mankind. With vanity, various ways come to change one's appearance.
Actually the base issue is 'pride' and 'xenophobia'. Or in even simpler language 'territoriality'. -- ____________________________________________________________________ We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" ravage@ssz.com jchoate@open-forge.org www.ssz.com www.open-forge.org --------------------------------------------------------------------
participants (7)
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Adam Back -
Adam Shostack -
Bill Frantz -
Jim Choate -
Steve Schear -
Thomas Shaddack -
Tim May