Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition
theoutline.com
theoutline.com
This reminds me of a sort of creative look into futuristic fashion I saw a bit ago:
Where the fashion of the future is made to be expressive while preventing mass surveillance.
Yes and no. Such levels of makeup are meant to be a mask. They are meant to at least partially obscure a person's true features or emotions. Facial recognition is having a very difficult time with women's faces under heavy makeup. Styles with strait lines or geometric shapes (right angles) really throws them off. I'd expect that no facial recognition system could yet survive comicon.
Any such recogniser which can be fooled by the usual surface details, especially given that roughly half the adult population of rich western nations have significant social pressure to apply such decoration, it would not be fit for purpose.
That said, the examples given in the article seem rather more extreme than any conventional makup. I can easily believe this would fool an AI that scored perfectly on conventional (non subculture) western levels of makup.
For example, the person who figured out how to heat food with microwaves (and created the first microwave) didn't set out to do so, he discovered that the chocolate bar in his front pocket melted while working on magnetrons.
"Figuring something out" doesn't imply concerted research towards that goal, accidental understanding happens all the time to all of us on many topics.
The chocolate bar story is attributed to Percy Spencer in 1945 and is probably somewhat fanciful - anyone working around high-power radar equipment would necessarily be aware of RF heating, because it presents a significant safety hazard. Spencer can legitimately claim to be the inventor of the microwave oven and is named on Raytheon's patent.
Willis Carrier was hired to build a machine to prevent the humidity in a room from making inks bleed at a magazine. He built the machine, which pulled moisture from the air by pulling them onto cooled coils, only to discover that the room dropped significantly in temperature.
He ran with it, and eventually founded the Carrier air conditioning company.
My original comment was a lame joke, sure, but it's one with a disturbing amount of truth behind it. Not all models like being models. I'd wager that hating the job might even be the norm. It has a high potential to be excessively stressful and even outright degrading, not to mention that it's a hotbed for shady business practices, outright fraud, and abuse (psychological, physical, and sexual alike). It's a career path notorious for its workers having little to no bargaining power.
I suspect that the folks voting my comment down don't actually know how shitty of a job modeling can be. I don't blame them for not knowing; on the surface, being a model seems fun and glamorous, right? Never mind that - like how office work is (usually) more than sitting around playing Solitaire all day - professional modeling is (usually) more than just hanging out all day and getting the occasional photo taken real quick (there is no "real quick" to these sorts of photo shoots).
Just my two cents.
That smiling pleasantly is hard
This is a neutral face: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a...
And this is the face of disdain I'm talking about: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGkhmT...
Many people do consider a neutral face to be aggressive or unpleasant, studies show, regardless of the intent of the person with the face.
> So Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, behavioral researchers with international research and innovation firm Noldus Information Technology, decided to investigate: Why are some faces seen as truly expressionless, but others are inexplicably off-putting?
> ...
> The researchers enlisted Noldus’s FaceReader.... The software...analyzes the image and assigns an expression based on eight basic human emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and “neutral.”
> To establish a baseline, Rogers and Macbeth first had FaceReader assess a series of genuinely expressionless faces. Those expressions registered about 97 percent neutrality, Macbeth said...
> Then they plugged in photos of RBF all-stars Kanye West, Kristen Stewart and Queen Elizabeth. Suddenly, the level of emotion detected by the software doubled to six percent.
> One particular emotion was responsible for the jump: “The big change in percentage came from ‘contempt,’” Macbeth said.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...
What sensors is FaceID using besides the camera?
I find it so interesting how we all interpret text so differently.
As I said in another comment, Knowing how many discoveries throughout history were completely accidental I actually interpreted the headline to mean they “stumbled upon” a method to beat facial recognition.
Its neat how we all infer our own meanings from headlines, at least here in this community we generally assume good faith rather than jumping to assumptions that the authors are bad people.
And you’re right about the CVDazzle, the cyberpunk nerd in me desperately hopes something like this becomes a fashion trend.
"Juggalo face makeup is better at throwing off facial recognition software than intentional methods."
There's your headline.
God I'm so tired of intentionally-misleading headlines. Clickbait nonsense.
FTA:
> According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that govern facial recognition technology.
I suspect people will come out with more problems accepting "figured out" for a negatively associated group than a positively associated one, even through I think the meaning of that wording is identical in both phrases.
Lifting Detail from Darkness
http://www.scribblethink.org/Work/Talks/dalmatian.pdf
This application sketch describes a high quality method for separating detail from overall image region intensity. This intensity-detail decomposition can be used to automate some specialized image alteration tasks. Our work was motivated by the movie 102 Dalmatians, which featured a dalmatian puppy without spots. Animal handlers determined that the obvious idea of applying makeup to the dog was not possible – evidently there was no suitable makeup that was both safe to the dogs and that would stay in place during normal dog activity (including licking). This left Disney TSL with the task of painting out all the spots on the dog every few frames (the paintings were carried for a few frames with a simple scheme). The spot removal task was larger than anyone guessed, and ultimately required a large number of artists (up to 40) working for eight months. The problem also proved to be more difficult than expected from an algorithmic point of view. As the spots often had visible fur texture, initially it was believed that there must be some simple compositing technique that could lighten these spots.
While the black and white paint does seem to negate a lot of natural contrast human faces have – and on which the recognition of faces is currently based – there seems a lot of information left to recognize specific faces, especially when considering stereovision or even possible pulsed laser reflection / LIDAR based solutions (think long-range iPhone X sensor).
Even if the recognition of an individual within a database of millions yields too many false positives, the set can be further refined by considering other subject metadata, say geolocation or social connections.
While considering this, it's still important to not succumb to privacy nihilism. Not everything is lost, but it's hard to practice that when 'beating' facial recognition tech means "looking like a fucking juggalo" [1].
It works to identify the perceptual hash of the depth and contour of the face. It beats all makeup, completely.
"No shoes, no shirt, no service" has also been a thing for as long as convenience stores have been around.
Not that far of a stretch to think this will ultimately extend to face paint.
If you want true anonymity, just wear a motorcyle helmet everywhere. We still don't know who The Stig is.
This is not true in the US. Banks certainly have a right to give any information you've given them to the government though.
We don't know who the current Stig is and it's entirely possible in my opinion that there have been "stand in Stigs" as well. Obscuring the face with a tinted-shield racing helmet eliminates a big method people tell others apart. You'd have to rely on clues like height / build instead. Makes it easier to swap out drivers for that character.
I've never heard of this.
> "No shoes, no shirt"
That's health code, not appearance.
There's a rap record label in the UK called "No Hats No Hoods", because of the ubiquity of that sign in certain parts of London.
But here's the thing: Nobody except my ISP even knows that I use a VPN. Nobody knows that I'm interested in online privacy and security issues. Because I only get into that online, using VPNs and Tor.
>That's health code, not appearance.
There's no such health code. At least the "shoes" part has been thoroughly researched:
Beards and 2010 Justin Bieber hair cuts halted face recognition 10 years ago. How do I know, because I had to manually label 10,000 frames with 200+ points because the "automatic landmarking tool" didn't put everything in the right spot.
Biometric security is, and always will be, a rat race. Once faces are handled / ruled out, they've move to the iris (30ft/10m iris extract was possible 10 years ago). After the iris (cause everyone will wear Black Mirror contacts or something), they'll move to gait analysis. My thesis was on identifying people based on the facial movements.
The point is, at some point, they're not going to "make it illegal" because it'd be improbable for everyone to adopt this cyberpunk fashion. Plus, their are enough other ways to identify someone as someone than the face that most future systems will likely be a combination of all of them using some level of confidence.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/denmark-face-veil-...
This isn't a problem isolated to facial recognition - many cancer screening tests are worse than useless, because the harm of unnecessary treatment due to false positives outweighs the benefits of early detection.
https://genius.com/Insane-clown-posse-what-is-a-juggalo-lyri...
Among other things, a Juggalo...
> He's a graduate He graduated from...well At least, he got a job He's not a dumb putz He works for himself scratching his nuts
Given this, nothing would surprise me about any headlines referring to Juggalos.
Why does "online" necessarily involve facial images? I've used this image[0] for several years. I did use a cropped and fuzzed version of this[1], for a while. And other images, for other personas.
0) https://s3.amazonaws.com/keybase_processed_uploads/7c420e0c6...
1) https://russia.wcs.org/Portals/32/images/News/Vladimir%20Ars...
As soon as you cross the line from mass recording of anonymous images to recognizing individuals, even in a public space, you require consent.
The only problem is that the main users of face recognition, security agencies and government are not subject to GDPR - that needs to be restricted in a future version because today it wouldn't have been politically feasible.
Sounds to me like it is the opposite and implicitly condones its use by excluding those organizations. The larger the law-built divide between government rights and non-government rights becomes, the less likely any of us entrepreneurs will be able to counteract it. Next, people will be cheering a law that prevents people from developing facial recognition technology.
And this is a bad result because it doesn't go to the politically impossible extreme? It's a foot in the door, we have a fighting chance for an universal right to privacy. That's the only way to restrict governments and the only way to get that is to convince the general public that it'a a right worth fighting for. The GDPR is a massive step in that direction.
Venice faced a related challenge (in a small city any passerby has a good chance of facial recognition) and it seems that their masks were sometimes used around the year for anonymity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice#Carnival_ma...
I think the holy grail would be if someone comes up with a tiny device that you can wear on your ear, or around your neck, that emits something invisible and that which only obscures cameras.
That way, the humans interacting with other humans in public are not looking like clowns in makeup and having normal interactions, while obscuring and befuddling the big-brother cameras.
I tried to research this in 2015 and was told about infra-red ray emitters. Not sure if there's any truth to it, or if it's even possible. If any of you have made any progress on this and would like to collaborate, please contact me. Email in bio.
The people had these suits to mask their face
I know this is crudely put and thus being downvoted, but there is a kernel of truth to it similar to the XKCD encyption / wrench[0] comic. Sure, you might've beat facial recognition in the lab, but in a real world scenario you're walking around in ridiculous looking clown face paint so you're going to come under immediate scrutiny regardless.
[0] - https://xkcd.com/538/
But no, that's silly. Really, you just need to give up on the idea of being anonymous in public. Because that was never something that you could count on.
I have noticed that it's very hard to recognize faces of people with very black skin, under low-light conditions. So I can imagine black makeup that's 100% non-reflective across a wide range of wavelengths. But then there's millimeter-wave radar. How would one block reflection of mmW radar?
I assure you there was little to no intellectual effort on their part towards that end.
Fucking magic. All in the motherfucking air.
This, people, is exactly what prejudice is.
> This, people, is exactly what prejudice is.
You're reaching.
That is one interpretation (as I covered elsewhere in these comments, "figured out" is used often in to describe discoveries that were accidental in nature. Interestingly, rarely to people complain about the wording when it's a white guy from 50 years ago), and I the fact that people are both jumping to that conclusion here, are unwilling to consider their interpretation might be biased, and feel the need to comment on this when it's already been noted and in numbers that I think are substantially higher than would be seen if the group in question did not have the same reputation, speaks volumes.
Is it actually so implausible that one of more people that consider themselves Juggalos (or associate with the group) notices they weren't being tagged quite the same way when in makeup, and investigated? If it's not so implausible, why is everyone rushing to point out it's probably not what happened, and if it is implausible, why do you think that? I don't know whether the discoverer is a Juggalo. I suspect he's not, from his Twitter feed, but I can't be sure. I've had plenty of friends into similar tech scenes and also into some weird shit (and I've been to a Defcon in the early 2000's, which is all the extra evidence I need). The fact that so many people seem willing to assume he's not and present that as fact (how many people clicked through to the twitter feed it to see if the person was associated with Juggalos?) in a refutation of the title (which only makes sense with that assumption), suggests something to me.
It’s interesting — knowing that so many major discoveries through all of history were completely accidental I didn’t read it this way at all. I actually interpreted it to mean they “stumbled upon” a way to defeat facial recognition.
It never ceases to amaze me how we can all read and infer such different meanings from text.