Facial Recognition for Pigs – China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces | Hacker News Reader

Facial Recognition for Pigs – China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces

nytimes.com

66 pointsrm288931 comments

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

-- George Orwell, _Animal Farm_

When pigs are surveilled to the degree as human livestock, they will have truly transformed into us and us into them.

It will still be some time until Google and Facebook have a profile on every pig on the planet.

Other than that this is a pretty cool application of cheap easy accessable machine learning technology.

That is a brilliant quote for the context, thanks!

Does it have to be the face? Just wondering if they could've used another combination of body parts with sufficient variation and use those as the "fingerprint" instead. Rather than "the bristles, the snout, the eyes and ears" specifically.

Or are faces evolved to be unique in (social?)animals and nothing else is as easy to tell apart?

This just conjecture, but isn't the body slightly more amorphous then the face? Body-fat and muscle can make someone, even a pig, look different but variables like the eyes, nose and ears generally stay the same (at least past puberty). We also have facial recognition technology already and it may be that it's easier to adapt to another mammals face than it is to work from the ground up again.

I've read that ears are pretty unique.

But I imagine that mass surveillance based on ear profiles would be difficult just because ears are small so it's harder to isolate high resolution pictures of people's ears. Also because things like long hair exist that would thwart attempts automated ear-oriented identification.

Just look at the barn. Pigs are smart creatures. How can a creature be happy in that barn? I had some of the best pork ever in Kauai where pigs roam pastures. Isn’t that a better solution?

Most smaller producers already recognize their livestock as well as family resemblance. If African swine fever does in fact produce a fever, wouldn't that be a better screening method? Like in an airport. Pigs are highly intelligent, and "tech" enabling them to increase or decrease barn temperature (up and down snout-pressed buttons) has shown to save money on heating bills.

How long until we have thisisnotarealpig.com?

> You're in private mode.

> Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.

It is the first time I see such a nag screen. Is there any firefox Add-on that could allow me a "stealth private mode"?

Meanwhile, I just disabled Javascript on this page, which works well enough (except for the images, it seems).

Tipp: I recently started using uMatrix with default-deny for everything except css/images.

It's remarkable how much faster most sites load (even compared to uBlock), and almost every site can be made functional in ~ 30 seconds by editing the settings in a nice grid view if it requires JS.

"You can’t take a single picture of a pig,” said Mr. He, who is trying to add to his database of more than 200,000 pig images. -Multiply by 400 million pigs, then imagine the emissions from these data centers!

I imagine the emissions are a tiny rounding error compared to the emissions of those pigs. Livestock and the fields to feed them are one of the largest contributors to climate change. If those servers improve efficiency at all that will easily offset their emissions

pigman

Straight from yesterday’s Joe Rogan podcast!

So this is the next step. First human-pig chimera hybrids. Now their population is so big that they need to develop facial recognition.

This sounds like one of the (few?) classes of problems that blockchain can solve best.

Get every pig tagged and on the blockchain. Then a quick scan tells you where it came from, where it's been, and who else it encountered along the way.

Replace “blockchain” with “database” and everything you said still applies.

I'm no blockchain fanboy but I believe the distinguishing features are "decentralized", "permanent" and "verifiable". If you put that stuff in a database, someone can change the database.

If someone can change a database, then why couldn't someone change data before being entered into a blockchain?

That is still an issue but blockchain-ish tech solves the "double spend of pig". I.e. you can't sell the same pig to many slaughter houses.

Except when you own more than 30% of the pigs then you have a higher chance to double spend a pig

that is doubly true for the owner of the database,atleast with a chain you can tell when manipulation is going on(on a long enough timeline)

But if I can enter stuff into the blockchain (And presumably I can, you can't breed pigs by consensus...), why would i care about double-spend?

If I acquire some stolen pigs, or some pigs from a less than ideal lineage, I'll just enter them into the blockchain and say they're the result of breeding.

Blockchain works because it's verifiable. Breeding pigs, digging carbon (in its many forms) out of the ground, turning these things into other things isn't.

I'd presume that entering them into this blockchain would require submitting their biometrics, at which point it'd be indelibly recorded that you had 37 new pigs, 33 of which looked identical to pigs stolen last weekend. Or you could fabricate biometrics, at which point you're fine until you try to sell them and then someone notices that the pigs you have aren't the pigs you own in the system.

It also makes it harder to keep, say, 2000 untaxed pigs, plus the 1000 pigs you pay tax for. Then sell the untaxed as one of the 1000 official pigs, but each official pig gets sold 3 times, each to 3 slaughter houses. If everything is publicly recorded, such as on a blockchain, you can't get away with that as easily.

maybe try git

It has to be a blockchain in a trustless pig-to-pig architecture. I don't trust the pigs not to manipulate the database; the incentive structure and the game theory is just not right.

Yeah, encryption will ensure the farmer can't remove the tag and put the tag from another pig on a pig, or that when the tag was created, there was actually a physical pig!

Keep the context in mind: face recognition. Plastic surgery is expensive.

I wonder if a little bit of lipstick can defeat pig face recognition.

It's possible to tag animals immutably. For example by non-painful branding in a specific location on the skin (e.g. behind the right ear.)

Trying to modify that branding, in that location, would leave a noticeable mark.

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