Makeup as low-tech measure against automated face recognition?

[Adam Shostack]

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