
Privacy at the cost of your diginty...
Don’t like the idea of having your mug identified in secret by a hidden camera? Neither does associate professor Isao Echizen of Japan’s National Institute of Informatics. As he notes in this paper: As a result of developments in facial recognition technology in Google images, Facebook, etc. and the popularization of …
"We should not *NEED* to have to use such things in order to maintain our privacy!"
Maybe when the day comes that some idiot with their face covered decides to attack you in the middle of town you'll have a different view of people covering their faces from cameras.
You will want the CCTV to catch them. You'll probably want the facial recognition to help catch them, but you at least want their mugshot on CrimeWatch.
You'd probably even want them caught mugging the person before you, so you never get attacked in the first place.
You will want your justice that would never come if we allow people to circumvent these devices put in for our own protection.
"Maybe when the day comes that some idiot with their face covered decides to attack you in the middle of town you'll have a different view of people covering their faces from cameras."
Thus writes the Anonymous Coward!
Excuse me, I think I need a new Irony Detector, mine's just exploded...
> Maybe when the day comes that some idiot with their face covered decides to attack you
I was attacked by a bloke who wasn't wearing any sort of face covering.
> You will want the CCTV to catch them
...But it won't. All the coppers could tell me was that the images were insufficient for them to do anything.
CCTV doesn't protect you. The resolution is not high enough for it to have any meaningful effect. The only deterrence it has is because some people *think* you'll be caught if you do something unlawful in view of a camera. And the serious lawbreakers know that the detection rate is laughable...
Vic.
Come on, give the guy a break. Does version 0.01 of your creation look any better?
In any case, I do not see what prevents you from wearing an Armani version of the same spectacles. I also do not see what prevents you from making the LED carousel trigger on a flash. In fact IR "backfire" on a flash is a well known anti-camera method. It is not particularly effective against ANPR (what it was invented for in the first place), but should do the job against face recognition (and paparazzi for that matter).
I agree it's a little surprising he's suggesting using IR since most cameras incorporate IR filters to get reasonable image quality (IR is not your friend). I see two reasons this could work:
1) filters don't get perfect cutoff, so if there's enough power coming from the LEDS they could still mess up the response. Radiating in NIR probably helps this since the cutoff will be worse.
2) many security cameras operate without an IR filter so that they can bathe an area in IR light and thus claim to "see in the dark". Adding a filter to these setups would prevent their ability to operate after hours.
And the if you think the first cop that sees you wearing a mask or brown paper sack on your head isnt going to come over to have a chat with you, you're insane.
The whole key to something like this would be making it concealed, not making yourself look like some crazy fuck with a damn grocery sack on his head like your suggestion, or like someone wearing ballistic eye protection such as the images in the article.
Mount it on some sunglasses though and it would be perfect. Unless the camera has an IR filter, as others have noted.
Nothing says you have to talk to them. They also cannot legally detain you and if they did detain you, unlawful detention comes into play. Wearing a bag is not against the law. You don't think those glasses wouldn't get their attention either? I did say a mask as well, but I guess you forgot that portion with your short attention span. You could be a member of the church of Jason.
Do the police stop people who wear a niqāb?
Hat. Brimmed with small, physically small, high power IR LEDs. The LEDs are invisible to the naked eye, they look like beads. To a solid state camera, they're overwhelming. Flash the LEDs on-off at a rate that will confound the autoexposure time constant (on the order of 500 ms, need to experiment). Camera will be blinded enough that facial recognition would have a chance.
Side benefit is all the security camera folks being driven insane. Rentacops running through the malls, looking for someone with a flaming hat.
>>Side benefit is all the security camera folks being driven insane. Rentacops running through the malls, looking for someone with a flaming hat.<<
Let's ignore for the moment the possibility that the camera has an IR filter.
Search Google Images for "shopping mall interiors." Count the number of people wearing hats. It might be a little different at Bass Pro.
It's not infrared it's near infrared. Still visible light, which is why you can still see it in the photo above. It's probably 850nm, which is what is used as "near infrared" for most security cameras. I think the idea to mess with the auto exposure is one of the better ones though. Perhaps something that makes the camera think it needs to change the auto focus. On cameras that actually do that. Any camera which zooms, which would be all the ones that can move around on the street would also have auto focus and thus be susceptible.
Yes, it is infrared, so no it's not still visible light. The "near" part of near-IR refers to that part of the IR spectrum nearest to visible light, it doesn't mean something that's nearly IR, because that would be just another name for red... The reason you can see the emitters working in the photo is precisely the reason why this idea works - whilst the near-IR emissions are invisible to the human eye, camera sensors are quite sensitive to them.
All daylight digital cameras already have an IR filter, but they aren't perfect. Quite a bit of IR still goes through, so this could quite easily work, as long as the LEDs are bright enough.
One possible problem is the faint red glow that humans can see from near IR LEDs. Though that may not be an issue under normal lighting conditions, I can't remember ever seeing an IR LED in daylight.
Given the 1984 states that many Governments security services would like, there would probably some form of regulation making this illegal.
Yes, this tech may prevent your face being recognised, but given it uses visible light. It is also obvious.
So as you are trying to fool the sensors, the sensors can detect that you are trying to fool them, making you a target.
T-800 heading straight for you!
and follow those in line before you while checking in to board a bus or a train. Please remove your glasses while entering our Tesco supermarket, so that we can properly conduct risk assessment procedure to even better serve our customers and to personalize the service they receive instore. Please remove your glasses and face-distorting stockings when walking on the street so that automatic traffic wardens can better serve the local community and avoid mishots. Thank you for your cooperation. No, you don't need to bend over and spread your cheeks on this occasion, we have the details of your cavities in our database already, but thanks for asking.
"I'm guessing you just used paint during Movember"
Nope, I shaved as normal. I'm a bit of a sociopath anyway, so it all seemed a bit odd growing a bit of face-mould to "highlight male health issues". Nobody where I worked spent any time talking about nad cancer, or male depression, and as far as I could see the main things highlighted and discussed were along the lines of "Doesn't Gavin look a **** with that moustache?", which tended to back up my starting position.
OK I got it a bit wrong about the simulated beard. In fact you have to smear the boot polish around a bit more asymetrically. The faces without the red squares successfully remained undetectable,.
http://cdn.gajitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/defeat-facial-recognition.jpg
... but if "cameras with outward-facing infrared lights." (the specific target of the device, as noted in the article) rely on the reflection of those infrared lights from an object (for focusing, visibility or whatever), wouldn't having an IR filter on the camera kind of defeat the purpose? I mean, it seems to me that if you're using IR lighting on your system, filtering out IR is probably the LAST thing that you want to do.
Now, if you're saying that this wouldn't work on cameras that specifically don't use IR illumination/reception and block thoise frequencies, I would suspect that you were right -- but that's not the target that they were apparently aiming at.
Or what am I missing?