Makeup as low-tech measure against automated face recognition?

[Adam Back]

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?