Article – How funky tortoiseshell glasses can beat facial recognition

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I value privacy. I hate how more and more we find ourselves losing that privacy. This is why I am always gratified that when some technology comes along to challenge my privacy there also comes along some clever hacker with an idea to counter the problem. In their paper, Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition, presented at the 2016 Computer and Communications Security conference, the researchers present their system for what they describe as “physically realisable” and “inconspicuous” attacks on facial biometric systems, which are designed to exclusively identify a particular individual.

The attack works by taking advantage of differences in how humans and computers understand faces. By selectively changing pixels in an image, it’s possible to leave the human-comprehensible facial image largely unchanged, while flummoxing a facial recognition system trying to categorise the person in the picture.

Where the researchers struck gold was by realising that a large (but not overly large pair of glasses) could act to “change the pixels” even in a real photo. By picking a pair of “geek” frames, with relatively large rims, the researchers were able to obscure about 6.5% of the pixels in any given facial picture. Printing a pattern over those frames then had the effect of manipulating the image.


 

5 thoughts on “Article – How funky tortoiseshell glasses can beat facial recognition”

  2. Crap. I already wear large geek glasses and can’t switch to contacts. I wonder what an eye patch would do to obscure facial recognition. I suppose wearing a welding helmet would attract attention…

  3. I see a few people from time to time wearing masks if they have a cold while in the hospital. In Japan it’s actually quite common to see folks wearing them out and about on any given day. Wonder how they would interact with the software…

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