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Comment by robbiemitchell | Hacker News Reader

Analyzing street art seems like something that will surprise artists when police figure out they can retroactively identify all the places someone vandalized (if they're ever caught once and tied to a particular style). I wonder whether artists will figure out how to confuse or otherwise prevent these kinds of automatic identification?

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This is a great question that I definitely don't know the answer to yet.

There is a trope around graffiti artists that their biggest fans are the police. Often an artist will spend all night painting a mural, and then by the morning its already gone, but the paint "buffers" submit a photo to the police.

I definitely think there will be a cat-and-mouse synonymous with the adversarial neural networks examples for hiding weapons in everyday objects.

At the end of the day, most street art is commissioned or done in pre-approved areas, so I don't think it will be a cause of concern with larger artists.

That would be a neat foia project - request graffiti datasets.

Never thought of that, but this is brilliant.

Most large metropolitan areas already have "Vandal Police" who track serious vandals. Has been going on for decades, if they grab a big name (sometimes spanning multiple metros) they can pin them for hundreds of crimes resulting in six figure fines or large stints of jail time. These are usually people not painting murals though.

Just while riding my bike around I have started to remember the different scribbles I see sprayed on the walls. I have no doubt someone who is actively looking would be able to do a pretty good job given it seems these people spray the same thing every time.

This reminds me of an infamous graffiti artist in London, Tox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Halpin

Literally every single tube line/carriage/station has his tag, tox followed by the year, eg tox 16, repeated over and over again

If the police go by that, they are prone to being fooled by someone framing that artist: faking their identifiable elements (style or content), but perpetrating a lot more damage.

on the one hand, id think the police have enough money and time to build a detection system like this. on the other, we have people building surveillance system for free in their spare time

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