The Camera-Shy Hoodie
macpierce.com
macpierce.com
The objective of the hoodie is to prevent face recognition.
Those who have come down with switcheroo fever are saying "aha! This actually makes you more recognizable, not less!"
But this is not a trick question and this is not the type of thing where the switcheroo is meaningfully responsive.
The objective is to prevent a camera from recognizing your face, and it does that. If you have tested positive for switcheroo fever, you should start your comment by stating out loud that you understand this is the objective and you understand that it does indeed achieve the objective before proceeding elaborate on your own personal variation of the switcheroo. And perhaps, if you dare, proceed to challenge mode, where you acknowledge that this might be a trade-off that was consciously chosen, and does not come as a surprise to the people who designed the product.
> If you have tested positive for switcheroo fever, you should start your comment by stating out loud that you understand this is the objective and you understand that it does indeed achieve the objective before proceeding elaborate on your own personal variation of the switcheroo.
I don't think this is necessary. If someone doesn't make any mention of whether or not it succeeds at preventing facial recognition, then they are simply not offering an opinion on the matter. Not mentioning it, or bringing up a different concern, should not be taken as disagreement. In fact, I would interpret silence on the matter as a sort of implicit agreement.
> And perhaps, if you dare, proceed to challenge mode, where you acknowledge that this might be a trade-off that was consciously chosen, and does not come as a surprise to the people who designed the product.
So commenters here are obligated to acknowledge a bunch of considerations about the designer's objective and state of mind when creating the hoodie, but the designer is not obligated to point out these trade-offs in their product listing? Isn't this a double standard?
Not just "a camera", but one that's in night-vision mode. The camera may not be using IR, or it may switch to normal mode at any time. You spent too much time telling people off for pointing out this hoody makes your head glow and may draw attention as a consequence.
My LG CX's remote uses IR for turning on, but beyond that it uses Bluetooth or some similar protocol.
Even if a remote is IR, rear cameras are often shielded against it. Front cameras, usually not. This is much easier to notice on IR-powered PC mice of course. Not sure if modern ones use IR as well - haven't checked.
Camera-jamming or IR-glare or something on those lines may convey the function better without setting wrong expectations.
The "camera-shy hoodie" defeats this latter type of security camera setup. Perhaps the article should explicitly say that this hoodie will be counter-productive in a high-security facility, as you'll be immediately noticeable to someone watching those cameras in real-time. But most cameras in the real world will not be monitored in real-time.
The IR hats that were going around the internet 10 years ago, and this modern version (in a hoodie) are about defeating that security model. The wearer's face becomes completely unrecognizable in recordings, and the wearer has plausible deniability about being at the location if questioned after the fact.
When security personnel are actively watching the cameras, like at a high-security facility, this makes you stand out. But if you're at a convenience store, it completely defeats their camera recordings.
Not if the camera has an IR-cut filter. And don't security camera feeds frequently get displayed to employees behind the counter (contrary to your assertion that nobody is watching)?
Even for those that do, IR filters are rarely perfect, so a bright enough IR light would still do the trick.
> Even for those that do, IR filters are rarely perfect, so a bright enough IR light would still do the trick.
Do you have a source for this? I've never tested it, so I can't say, but I would want to want to see some proof first.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Tonton-Outdoor-Infrared-Suitable-Secu...
https://www.amazon.com/Tonton-Outdoor-Infrared-Suitable-Secu...
That's the very opposite. That's a camera that uses IR illumination to record at night. That's what all those LEDs around the lens are for. And due to this it lacks any IR filtering. This particular camera is more IR sensitive than most cameras like DSLRs or cell phones.
> Do you have a source for this? I've never tested it, so I can't say, but I would want to want to see some proof first.
You can test it by pointing a remote at a camera. Normal cameras like cell phones and DSLRs have IR filters. They still can see the blinking LED on an IR remote, because the filter isn't perfect.
No, the camera also has IR cut - it lists the feature right in the product title, and the customer-provided samples in the reviews clearly have an IR cut filter applied (you can tell by the "natural" colors in the daytime photos). Is has two modes of operation, daytime mode and nighttime mode. During daytime mode it employs an IR cut filter, and during nighttime mode it removes the filter and adds additional IR lighting for "night vision".
For more info on how IR-cut works in security cameras, see this support article from Annke (another seller of cheap security cameras on Amazon): https://help.annke.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403980153497-What-...
> They still can see the blinking LED on an IR remote, because the filter isn't perfect.
Being able to see a faint blinking LED from a remote is not sufficient to prove that the effect is strong enough to completely obscure a person's face when an IR cut filter is applied, in my opinion.
Ah, I see
> Being able to see a faint blinking LED from a remote is not sufficient to prove that the effect is strong enough to completely obscure a person's face when an IR cut filter is applied, in my opinion.
It's just a matter of intensity. An IR filter is going to block some percentage. If it blocks 90%, you just need a 10X stronger light. At some point this gets impractical of course, but you can buy some really powerful LEDs. Most security cameras are cheap and the IR filter is there to improve the image in the daytime, not to counteract intentional attacks.
In a dark area it completely obscures your face (https://twitter.com/frankus/status/1499257277894705155), and you have plausible deniability in terms of wearing it specifically for defeating cameras.
Is there any downside to these? Such as distracting cars or blinding other cyclists?
So probably no more distracting to the person with the light than the light is to the person wearing the hoodie.
In any case it’s a similar material as road signs that are a similar size.
Exactly. If anything, for this scenario, it would increase your visibility in a good way!
To distract cars - to draw attention to you - so they don't not see you riding / running / walking on the side of the road and run you over?
When I used to ride a motorcycle, I remember lots of riders used to advise having your full lights on when driving during the day, so you were more noticeable to motorists.
However, I noticed a driver holding up their hand to shield their eyes while I was riding during the day.
Needless to say I didn't do that any longer after that.
You want to be noticed but not cause an accident!
One speculative possible downside: others have answered the human aspect, but in the context of security/privacy OP is being perhaps a little blase with "plausible deniability", or at least it may vary by region? I can see why such a jacket could be useful and why a cyclist or jogger or the like would wear one, same as other visibility enhancing gear. But at the same time I've never ever seen such a thing anywhere in our state. And on camera it apparently looks like a neon sign. Sure, that obscures your face, but at the same time it will instantly draw the attention of any human security watching or potentially of AI if it's been tasked to look for such outliers. If it caught on and a quarter or half or whatever people were wearing such things at night then that wouldn't matter again, but anything that makes one "unique" in a crowd, regardless of what it is, represents signal. If someone is the only one (or one of only a couple) wearing something like that then even without their face they could still be tracked uniquely just by that. And with advances in later generation biometrics like gait analysis wearing such a thing might not only fail to stop individualized identification, but also leak information in terms of "this person is trying to hide their identity" which might correlate to groups in ways hard to predict.
Of course again, that could be taken as an argument to try to make all this sort of thing more of a trend, but there is a first-mover calculation to make maybe depending on what someone is trying to accomplish. If one just wants to help hide others or mess around with camera tracking for the fun of it though that'd be no problem. It's the same kind of dilemma as all sorts of other "blend with the crowd" stuff, like Tor say. If everyone ran an onion router (ignoring current gen scaling issues) then there'd be zero signal from doing so, the protection offered would be strongest, and also the vast majority of traffic would be completely boring and legitimate because so would almost all the users. It'd be much harder to crack down on as well. If only a few people run it and specifically do so to conduct covert activity, well the mere act of doing so then potentially leaks a bit. And both sides are subject to reinforcing effects, if "everyone does it" and "it's normal" and "almost entirely legit" then that makes it easy for anyone new to join, constantly reinforcing the network. Conversely if it's something strange with whiffs of criminality, then many won't which in turn reinforces it being strange and those using it maybe having something suspicious going on. Bootstrapping that can be a tough nut.
Anyway just sort of thinking out loud so to speak. For cameras I'm leaning towards ultimately some sort of legal response being needed, and that individuals trying to evade it is probably a losing battle.
Catching criminals is a rarely a sufficient excuse for degradation of privacy for everyone.
10/10, would recommend to pedestrians walking on the steet at night!
10/10, would recommend for very clean hands.
999/1000 people look similar. One is just a glowing sun of light.
Which one do you go take to the backroom?
The documentation lists its limitations, which include daylight:
> The Camera Shy Hoodie is not an end-all-be-all for hiding your identity. It’s good for one thing, blowing out the view of night vision (IR) cameras in low light environments. It’s not effective in sunlight, most indoor lighting, or against conventional cameras. In fact, you will draw attention to yourself if you wear this in a context in which the security cameras are actively monitored. In the view of an IR camera, it’ll look as if you’re flashing a light directly at the lens. In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m).
The idea is designed to exploit limitations with the camera's auto-exposure, and I presume a requirement to do that is to strobe a light that outshines the ambient light by n times. That works at night because there's so little ambient light, during the day you'd have to outshine the sun (and the sun is really bright).
In that particular case, it wold make far more sense to hand out a cost-reduced version that people could wear over their own clothes.
I'm thinking of something with the LEDs mounted in a plastic ring like these (https://www.glowuniverse.com/20-inch-glow-stick-necklaces-8-...), with a battery box/controller, and maybe some kind of protest messaged taped to it.
For protests, the best form of flattery is to be imitated, so this website [2] and others, lets you pay your respects and flatter the police.
So this is not that.
I didnt get taught law, its not something that is a compulsory subject to teach and the adult population certainly doesnt get taught about the upgrades or changes to law, so I cant have a democratic debate over the laws that exist.
Ergo we are living in a legal dictatorship that put Mussolini to shame, but as most people dont know who he is, thats a point thats wasted on people.
Why is the state hell bent on removing everyone's privacy as well?
These anti-mask laws are designed to harm the public, especially when considering the riot police will be balaclava'ed up and in full riot gear.
If the scientific community especially at Uni, werent such pussy's there would be psychological paper's that exist demonstrating the provocative nature of the riot gear uniform, using military techniques, because the police and military share many training elements.
Representative democracy is a trick to cede autonomy over one's actions, so if you needed a way to control a population en-masse, this would be a disarmingly charming way to achieve this objective, the sort of thing a self attracted sociopath would come up with, and something that continues to attract sociopaths with narcissistic attributes around the world to this day!
The only groups I see benefitting from this are the agents of oppressive regimes, and the meth heads breaking into your storage shed at night and stealing your bike.
Regardless, when it happens, it's still a police force, so you still have esprit de corps, "blue wall of silence" and "DA doesn't feel like prosecuting people they work with day to day" effects, and evidence is quite frequently not gathered or "gets lost". So for example if there is excessive use of force at a protest it wouldn't be unusual for those recordings to be misplaced. Bodycams aren't universal yet, but they're always somehow turned off during excessive use of force. The latest example would be a 16yo refugee who was shot dead with an MP5 (i.e. not standard-issue-24/7-belt-carry for police, something you have to get from the car), all officers had bodycams, no recordings. Five officers were charged with various things (up to 2nd degree homicide) because a citizen made an audio recording of the police action (which is a felony btw.), revealing contradictory and false statements.
Additionally, do you have any figures, even very approximate, for what proportion of the time police bodycams are worn and on and what proportion of incidents have said camera turned off? This helps see if there's a real mismatch/incidence of corruption here.
And putting on masks to obscure your face is illegal in protests in Germany.
See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermummungsverbot
[0] I mean that in a legal sense, that's how the police works. Whether stopping the protest is morally the right thing to do or not is a different issue that I don't want to address here.
(*) The generalization is okay in this context, because behavior is pretty uniform and larger protests will have riot police pulled from other states anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yel...
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/18/vr_telemetry_identity...
The example described in the paper in your link is using cameras that are setup to provide very high resolution images of people. It would be like using full-frame portrait images for face recognition, and then expecting that to translate to real-world scenarios where you might only have 20 pixels on a face, and the person is off-axis to the camera.
Gait detection has been discussed for a while, and may definitely be a thing one day, but right now we are barely at the point where pose estimation is a thing in security video. Very far from being able to do high precision pose recognition and sampling over successive frames to model something that would qualify as "gait".
So, they become the low hanging fruit. The more resources we give our TLA's, the less this matters, of course :)
Imagine Epaletts-like-strips of IR/UV LEDs connecting with magnets to any garment.
Or low cost strips of IR LEDs glued to some neodymian magnets which are attachable to camera shrouds.
Else - Epoxy filled paint-ball rounds to be shot at cameras to obscure view, or fast-dry epoxy rounds for shooting at drones/kill-bot joints.
If you havea BostonDynamics B.I.T.C.H. (Battle Intelligent Tactical Canine Hunter) after you - shoot its joints with epoxy that freezes its legs/joints/sensors)
EDIT: - This is what every Major, Col, Gen should have in their leafs and stars:
>>"Ive often wondered if shirts with Epaulets equipped with LED IR lights might provide a shroud"
Every general/col/maj should have this technology integrated in uniform.
Yes you can thwart via, but then - you wind up just tracking anyone with it.
Thus you need a "rain" of micro particles in a crowd where every single particle sets off said "anti-sensors"
How cyberpunk do you want to get with the designs?
Maybe I'm missing the point since both deter automated face recognition but then you could add to the classifier this huge light source as another thing to recognize.
All of that said, wearing something like this out (unless it becomes super commonplace lol) just screams watch me closely (and easily follow me back to some known origin).
Based on the documentation, all that would probably do is allow the effect to work at slightly closer distances.
Based on the documentation, all that would probably do is allow the effect to work at slightly closer distances:
> In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m).
Putting them on the chest would help with ergonomics. It would work even if you have the hood off and the LEDs would be more consistently positioned.
At a greater distance with lower MP security cameras, this thing might still work.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv8j8w/a-tattoo-and-an-etsy-...
So even though the name says adversarial, how is it actually being adversarial?
I wonder if it does.
Maybe places like parking garages would have some mounted where a person wearing one of these might walk by, but the significantly small numbers would make any junk data insignificant. So, I cannot imagine these being useful to that end. Other cameras like traffic cameras or toll boths or similar mounting locations would also not be hampered by these shirts unless you make them into a complete body wrap for the car.
However, I do see them being useful as conversation starters when someone asks WTF you're wearing. It would have a much better chance of increasing awareness of ALPR tech and possibly other camera tracking tech in general. But even that is pretty much meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
I guess it's time to haul out the t-shirt press...
Just need to head over to redbubble now.
Even for cameras that are not in color mode in low-light video, most newer units have good dynamic range, whereas these low-power IR LEDs would likely not be able to fully obscure a persons face in the video.
Probably this tint is compensated for in normal light.
I actually was obsessed with IR cameras and mods for some reason around 10-12 years ago. I remember using developed empty photo films to block visible light and let only IR through after removing the IR filter.
It’s 2023 pandemic if you want to be anonymous wear a mask.
It does seem to only work against IR cameras though - presumably brightly lit scenes won't struggle.
You would be amazed at how criminal the Police in the UK really are, they do a good job of PR on social media and the press doing them favours to get leads on stories.
You are better off having your own stealth AV devices recording your every move and sound 24/7, built into jewellery, head torches, clothing, dash cams for vehicles, and smart phones recording all the time, so you dont even have to bother taking a photo or video, just point and record. And where possible have it streamed live back to your servers with a dead man's switch.
Its the only way to combat the intelligent entity's who seek to dominate.
You are living through a technological arms race.
They are too obvious, if you have a brick property, put a few bee/insect bricks at different heights into the walls and then drill through from the inside of the property and put a slim line camera like the AXIS P12 Modular Camera Series in one of the larger bee/insect holes. Doesnt matter then if the individual has their face facing the ground, which is lot of the time, you'll still get a good image of their face.
You can find even cheaper cam's if you search aliexpress.com.
Not when owning a stealth A/V device is a criminal offense
In the meantime, I'll carrying on breaking the law to carry on protecting myself, building up my portfolio of criminals!
[0] "doesn't forbid" would be more accurate description
It didn't work either with a baseball cap and a mask under the nose.
The tech person had every possible path wired up with Monster video cables. A waste of probably $500!
For your gated community, it seems like a detection for the video feed going haywire that calls the cops might be useful.
How is that state of the art? My phone from 2015 had 21 megapixels[0].
to which it shows up as a giant flashing sign
you think wearing hoodies is an indication that you are ready to commit violent theft?
I hate society.
"I like to sweat in warm clothes during summer months" isn't a valid reason.
High power LEDs in the visible spectrum are terribly bright, and when I accidentally get them shined into the eye, it really feels concerning if any harm has been done.
https://medium.com/@alex.kilpatrick/ir-illumination-and-eye-...
He concludes:
"If you buy the largest IR floodlight available on Amazon and you stare at it 200 mm (~7") from your face for more than 1000 seconds (~ 16 minutes) there is a possibility you might damage your cornea. So don’t do that. And I doubt anyone would do that because these things get pretty hot at that distance."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18401892
I like the comment about the Ministry of Silly Walks.
It's one thing to narrow down a city-sized population to a list of 50 people known to walk with a similar gait, and then follow up with other forms of investigation before drawing conclusions. It's another for a cop to look at the top match and go arrest that guy, as they've done more than once with facial recognition.
I was being facetious as I don't believe hackernews readership is that enterprising.
I thought I once saw on Reddit that target already uses this in stores. I could be wrong.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1917222117
or bite marks forensics, aka we can make it work against any guy prosecutor picks
In real world without someone to fram^^^compare to it seems pretty useless https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/washingtondc/ne...
It is most certainly not, unless you’re talking straight on well lit training data.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/16/7310 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589632... ...
That said I have no insight as to how many of these techniques have been found to scale well or have started to make it into product. It has been publicly reported that NEC’s NeoFace (a system that many police and govt use) newer versions does indeed have occlusion (mask) recognition operating at very high levels.
anyways thats just my understanding as an interested bystander -- not in the field.
iPhone face unlock has worked while wearing a mask for a while now.
You know how you can identify exactly which family member is walking in the door from across the house, and maybe even what mood they're in? Or how little clarity you need to identify your child or spouse on a 480p camera feed? That's what machine learning makes possible across all types of sensor input, picking out those little but distinct patterns. There's really no way to be anonymous in public once ML surveillance software is widespread.
I wonder if it's possible to make it bright enough to blind regular (non IR filtered) cameras too?
With better noise reduction algorithms, more sensitive sensors and lower noise sensors, IR filters are now almost always used in smart phone cameras.
My guess would be that something bright enough to wash out the red channel would still leave the blue and green intact. So there should be enough information that the image is degraded but not necessarily blinded.
But I could be wrong, depending on how independently the color sensors and processing work.
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you. If it’s it’s not directed away from your eyes, a bright IR light an inch away from your eye can cause harm.
https://ehs.lbl.gov/resource/documents/radiation-protection/...
as mentioned all over in the thread, adding jitter would probably help.
worth noting that every camera is going to have a different AE algo, so it could not be relied on and you only need one frame to succeed for the system to be defeated.
what you would definitely get, however, is excessive triggering of any region of interest detection for the video stream. not exactly low key!
all told, pretty cool experiment nonetheless!
on a related note, i often used to think it would be cool to put IR LEDs in public places where people take pictures, sort of like hidden messages or art for people to discover, but only after they look through their phone cameras.
>Darkness is no longer the refuge it used to be Tbh from personal experience darkness still is the refuge for people like me going on quiet night walks, until the time I got mugged. Darkness was a great refuge for them, not so much for me after that day. Or the time that a burglar entered my house at 4am and was cleaning out my room, reaching over my sleeping body to grab my phone charging next to my pillow. Great refuge, felt so safe.
For home surveillance I may just have to equip motion spotlights as well, now.
So this hoodie is actually a covid hoodie too (assuming you turn it inside out)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S101113442...
First, almost every security camera on the market these days has a IR cut filter switcher which means these aren't going to be affective against cameras in the daytime as the IR light is filtered out.
Second, there are other methods of identifying people using cameras if facial recognition fails. You can identify people by their gait, or by their clothing, track them back to their car and get their license plate, etc.
There is a bunch of stuff online about exposure to IR-A wavelengths, which covers the common IR LED/illuminator wavelengths. You certainly CAN build something which can cause various kinds of eye damage, but it is going to be a unit that you can literally feel the heat off of. For practical purposes, you couldn't make a wearable battery powered device that would be likely to cause eye damage without the entire thing being very large and unwieldy, assuming of course you are using standard incoherent (eg:non-laser) source.
I'm not sure the power levels of this hoodie but if you're 3 meters away from an LED it's way different from if you are 10cm away.. I wouldn't assume safety when making up new use cases for a 'safe' product.
Point it at the front of your TV remote control and press a button to see it in action.
I've never tried in a movie theater :p but have noticed this effect by pointing my phone camera at an IR television remote and pressing some buttons. The IR LED lights up and is only visible to the camera and not the naked eye.
Anyhow, I'm more just curious why studios / cinemas don't take relatively simple measures like this to prevent pirate recordings from being created. Perhaps the IR would be too easy to circumvent via a physical lens filter.
During daytime, I assume cameras use visible ambient light (that's at least how my baby monitor works fwiw :-). And of course any regular camera e.g. Dslr I assume wouldn't care much?
But I trust this community understands this tech better than I do.
if you can eliminate your movements and shape then you're ahead of the game, otherwise you're identifiable
> Hoodie is a DIY adversarial garment
who wants to wear an adversarial garment? adversarial people.
man, life is so much better when you don't approach it adversarially. most people are happy to see your face, and you can see it on theirs.
worrying is stressful anxiety that your friends (who can see your face) can't completely erase for you. adversarial essentially means "looking for anxiety". I'm saying step back, it's not the only way to live.
downvoting btw is also adversarial so have at it, you'll feel better... not :)
lmao?
There's certainly people who are doing it out of anxiety, either intentionally or because of their own history or mental issues. For them, it may not be easy or possible to just decide to live another way. Either there actually is something they need to be adversarial towards or they're well aware that it's not necessarily rational, but it's not any easier for them to stop than it is for a depressed person to "just be happy".
I disagree.
Who wants to wear an adversarial garment? People stuck caught under the spying eyes of adversarial governments and adversarial surveillance capitalism companies.