Makeup as low-tech measure against automated face recognition?

[Tim May]

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
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rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no
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York Historical Society, October 7, 1789