Artist uses a computer model of his face to get a French National ID
raphaelfabre.com
raphaelfabre.com
He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person identified by this card looks like this" to an official looking at that card. If he modeled his head well and chose good render settings, it might be truer than a "real photo" in this regard.
That's not true. Your passport photo is supposed to be a snapshot of what you looked like in person at a certain point in time. It is the difference between a registration and a creation.
The likely effect of actions like these is that eventually the passport office will take the photographs to avoid people playing games with the system (such as: replacing the eyes with the eyes of someone else or changing other details that might screw up the biometric passport requirements).
Then the photo the Post Office official took fails this test. My skin is not green and my hair is not black. They sure look that way in my passport photo.
The likely effect is that my official "photo" will become an amalgamation of AI facial recognition scans at official checkpoints through time. Perhaps closer to this render than any single photo could be.
That's the scary part. The machine will simply learn to recognize me on sight. The 4th Reich won't have to demand my papers, it will already know me by heart.
The process how that picture was obtained doesn't necessarily change the usefulness - a really good pencil drawing may be more accurate and useful than an unlucky photography.
It's already here if you're a person of interest.
Soon your passport photo will be a 3D scan of your face. Increases ability to recognize under different lighting conditions.
> Contactless technology will remove the need for eligible travellers to present a passport to verify their identity in automated immigration clearance.
> The identity of a traveller will be confirmed on the basis of a unique biometric identifier, such as their facial image, instead of document based checks. The live facial image of the traveller at the SmartGate will be matched against an image previously verified as the unique identifier associated with that identity.
> This verified image and others collected during subsequent travel, become the images used by the Department to confirm identity on future travel.
http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w...
Feel free to submit a photo that confuses the biometric requirements, hope you like the automated border gates rejecting your passport
I find it bloody marvellous. I was on the Heathrow Express literally 20 minutes after getting off the plane from Melbourne. That's how it should be.
The border agent, when handed an EU passport, does exactly the same (match the photo to the face) and nothing much more. What exactly is the problem with automating that?
Actually, that seems like a really good idea to avoid being tracked by facial recognition systems. Remove enough detail from your photo so that you can't be identified by a neural net, but can still be identified by a human?
I forget the exact number, but the distances between n points on your face is a representation of your face. So we've reduced that to a number too.
- is a photography really a snapshot of what something looks like? seems to be an easy one until you look closely at the history of technology behind photography
- if photography is a faithful representation of something, does it mean there's not "creation" involved? how can photography be considered art if it's not creation?
- "a passport photo is supposed to depict a snapshot of your face" and "all photos are fiction" are not mutually exclusive statements
- and so on
That is the case in Hungary, where I'm from. I was surprised by this the last time I had a passport made. It came out looking good, I was just upset that I had had photos made before because the rules weren't communicated clearly. Other than that, I see no drawbacks.
Countersignatures are mainly intended to confirm a person's name/identity. They certify the photo too, but an adult who hasn't had a passport before needs to attend an interview where the photo will be checked and applicants who do have a previous passport will have the new photo checked against the record.
I do think the countersignature system should be revisited, though.
tl;dr: on my ID card I look like my digital psychopathic serial killer brother.
This doesn't make any sense. Use a slightly wider or longer lens and you get vastly different pics, and we're not even talking about lighting or other aspects yet.
"Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
What on earth makes you assert this? Do you personally know the man?
"Artists" have been known to perform stunts in this vein.
I pulled out my new photo ID received days ago and showed my son the godawful photo on it. We had a good laugh about how it doesn't look like me at all. He could tell because he was looking at me right then while we talked.
I stand by my idea that if you have not seen this person in person, you don't really know how representative it is. My ex husband consistently took hideous photos of me. My sister consistently took charming photos of me. Photos say as much about what is in the mind's eye of the photographer as they do about the subject -- and sometimes more.
Your own passport or ID photos being particularly bad isn't actually relevant to the assertion that this is a good likeness of this man. How do any of us know this is a good likeness of him, other than just taking him at his word?
I guess they scanned it in with crappy settings and didn't care enough to fix it.
[0] https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/konst-form/konstnar-har-sjalvp...
[1] https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/konst-form/transportstyrelsen-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
I've been messing with the system here by sanding off my prints before applying for a passport:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-belt-sander-and-the-battle-f...
That was a fun exercise but this guy takes it to the next level.
I don't know if this exists but I do remember an old James Bond where that trick was pulled...
For example - why would a 3D model based on high-quality photogrammetry be any less "real" than a digital photograph.
It's just a few more stages in a processing pipeline that starts with his real face.
If however - there was no photographic source material - either for geometry or textures - then it becomes much more interesting.
I suspect it's actually somewhere between the two and therefore mildly interesting but not incredibly profound.
Because it isn't. It shows that you can get a digital ID based on the photograph of an entity that technically never existed, it's a texture map around human shaped blank, not a photograph of a human. You can bet that to the authorities this is a real problem.
What's important is a controlled process that attaches this photo to a hard-to-forge token, such as a passport or other identity document. It confirms that some designated clerk looked at the photo and at the person, and also at other documents confirming the identity of that person, and maybe asked questions to make sure the person is who (s)he alleges to be.
That photo is for reference only, and is worth next to nothing without the identity verification process above.
I think I know a thing or two about the processes involved to get a pass on being allowed to use digital imagery as proof of identity, the one thing that everybody involved from the official side was quite clear on was that any kind of tampering with the image content was absolutely forbidden.
So I would expect this piece of art to have some far reaching consequences.
Any tampering is forbidden right? Even the transposition of a pixel is forbidden - it's technically illegal, but as long as it doesn't make a difference then I don't think anybody is going to care - so what if this pixel is cyan in this picture and turquoise in the other.
When things are really going to hit the fan is if you are able to have a digitally altered picture that passes the eye test for visual verification but is useless somehow for facial recognition algorithms (altered facial proportions, etc etc). That's a big if, because I don't know much about facial recognition technologies, I'd suspect they're born from machine learning technologies based for human curated results.
I don't quite understand what you mean. I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened. Only if a digitally altered picture can pass both a visual clerk test and facial recognition software will this be considered a problem.
Also, everything is still pointing towards having the passport office make the photograph. Right now post offices do have picture taking facilities - I think that if you just prevented people from taking their own to the post office, or made them take the picture at a place that never let you take possession of the photograph, that would be roughly equivalent. Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.
This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity. Even compression artifacts were 'out', this posed some very interesting challenges in controlling the laser printers available at the time to output grayshades (which they really did not want to do), early attempts at dithering did not meet the required standards.
> Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.
Interestingly enough, my partner at the company that I worked for in the 80's (and who is technically retired) has just started up a new company to make those pictures with your smartphone.
I guess I didn't make my question clear enough which is why that sort of integrity matters. Is it just in response to government legislation that has nothing to do with the usefulness of the ID, or is there some sort of measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ID if that sort of integrity is not followed?
A crappy photograph with no compression artifacts is arguably a worse form of ID than a very well taken image that has compression artifacts. And with an extra layer of lamination and holographic images superimposed across the pictures, why is that allowed but discreet photo manipulation isn't? Is it just that the government doesn't fully understand technology so just knee-jerk bans all of it, or is there an actual basis for the suspicion of such things leading to bad identification?
It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal, and the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.
So this new model might lead to additional legal changes, but the main changes a customer might see is that if the government decides it was wrong and decides on another definition of "falsification" (not likely) or the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.
That goes for all laws.
> the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.
No, the law is embodying many years of experience with people attempting to forge IDs. So 'tampering' with the inputs to the process is tantamount to forgery, it makes good sense and it draws the lines in an extremely clear and non-ambiguous way. Far better than to leave some vague statements open to interpretation about what manipulation is allowed and what not (fun bit: people asking the service if we can edit out their wrinkles...).
> the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.
In some places they do this, you get a certificate of authenticity with your passport photographs that you have to hand in to the officials.
That sounds just fine to me. It's currently a stressful process of trying to follow all the composition requirements and hoping they don't reject it. Might as well have them do it themselves. More work for whoever has to take the photo, less work for everyone else.
From an administration point of view, whether you took a picture of your face and mapped it onto a 3D model, or just gave them the original picture makes zero difference. Last time I renewed my card, I gave them four years old pictures, I looked totally different, and they do not give a damn.
Identification through only a picture was dumb in 1985, and still is.
That you got away with giving them four year old pictures is good for you, I tried and was refused (and had to go make new pictures). And I haven't changed all that much (the giveaway I guess was that the picture was the same as the one I gave them last time when I applied for a passport).
When making ID cards for my children, I was too lazy to also apply for a passport at the same time. Applied a few weeks later and the photos got rejected because they were the same as the ID ones. According to the clerk, they can be identical only when both submissions are on the same day.
Since the passport had been issued about 9 years before, the new driving license contained a picture already 9 years old (and identical to the passport).
Nearly ten years later (nearing expiry), it therefore contains a photo about 19 years old. I like to think I still look like that youthful person, of course.
Of course that is only for preliminary identification, but then this is a more accurate representation than a sketch.
[To bypass a no-fly list, for example]
The hair is the thing that gives it away most to me. Do love the detail with the beard stubs!
I suspect 2018 is the year that stops being an thing
I showed it to my wife with no context, and she immediately asked if it was a still from a new video game.
Hair has a shine that would almost never happen unless you dumped an entire bottle of shampoo on your head for a week straight. It also just sinks right in, no pores, nothing.
Texture quality is still a bit low,especially on the forehead. Normal maps are off (or not there at all), so there's no bumps and crevices there. Skin is blurred (but that may be a compression artifact)
And of course, the blur feels extremely unnatural. Especially knowing the shitty photomatons 99% of people use to get their pictures taken for official purposes, they'll never have such a focus on the face and blur everything out.
Edit: this comment makes a pretty good point regarding that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14576962
Yes - photos of the face will have been used as texture and bump maps.
"Artist uses a blog post to provide evidence of government falsifying documents."
I wish this was a '/s' but really it's true!