Makeup as low-tech measure against automated face recognition?

[Steve Schear]

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