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Comment by web007 | Hacker News Reader

Look up "CV dazzle" for the equivalent in the modern age, makeup effects to avoid facial detection / recognition.

By far the most common usage in the real world is in camouflaging prototype cars while being tested on the road https://www.bmw.com/en/automotive-life/prototype-cars.html

This way paparazzi can take pictures but it's hard to distinguish the shapes.

I think they also sometimes wrap polystyrene blocks under the camouflage too, so that particular curves on e.g. the wings or nose etc are altered by virtue of the camouflage having to confirm over that too.

I was about to say, dazzle camouflage seems just about perfect for doing 3d scanning on, so many nice high contrast areas for measuring stereo disparity!

Yeah absolutely this. I think in "the old days" a decade or two ago that sort of thing would have been largely out of reach to all but the most determined/well-founded adversary (I'm thinking corporate espionage, magazines etc, not nation states checking out the new Merc etc).

But now probably pretty much anyone in their bedroom could do it in a few hours. Literally next post after this one is for https://vgg-t.github.io/

That's really interesting. The times I've seen Toyota street testing pre-release cars, they were not disguised whatsoever, and had unmissable "factory" number plates

I've seen Mercedes-Benz test their car in camouflage even though the car was already unveiled. I guess they didn't wanna go through the effort to unwrap it. They were also a long way from Germany (with German plates).

I'd say the most common usage in the real world is click-bait surveillance fear articles discussing CV-Dazzle and the entire surveillance state being erected. The theater around all this is as much "it" as the things themselves.

Buddy Peter Thiel hangs out in the white house and provides Palentir services to law enforcement that they would not be allowed to do themselves without a warrant.

The surveillance state is here

I've seen plenty of these cars around Stuttgart and Munich. These patterns make it surprisingly hard to discern details in their shapes. Add to that the fact that early prototypes are deliberately padded to obscure their actual design and there's virtually no way to tell what the final production car will look like when you see these on the road.

You can see these cars (called "Erlkönig") all the time when driving near car manufacturer headquarters, and often also elsewhere on the Autobahn.

The car manufacturers do this for the coverage (pun intended). It probably also feels cool if you are on the team.

I remember that when it first came out. I get it’s a theoretical or fashion type thing, but the concept seemed flagrantly absurd to me. Block automated facial recognition in a way that in turn makes your face instantly recognisable in any crowd…

I've heard this as a reaction to the strategy before. "Now you're much more recognizable!" Well, yes and no. You're identifiable in the sense that you're unique among people in a crowd. But that equivocates between two different senses of identify. There's nothing actionable about looking at a person who looks different and saying "well they look different." That doesn't attach to any database or anything.

Meanwhile, positive facial identification attaches to all kinds of legal and intelligence infrastructure. Now, you can be charged with crimes, have a warrant executed against you, can be accused of supporting terrorists if you show up to a protest, etc.

I suppose I don't think the criticism is wrong, but it seems to presume that this is new information not previously understood rather than an intentional calculated risk.

Especially at the time it came out, surveillance footage was mainly going to be reviewed by mark I eyeballs, so the inability for computers to notice where a face was is going to be way outweighed by the person being sooo much more recognizable to a human.

If you don't think there is a disadvantage to looking different in a protest, think about the "qanon shaman" from 1/6 him looking different totally made him more of a target to being identified.

I'm struggling to understand how this is responsive. Unless those "mark 1 eyeballs" are a positive identification of a specific person, you're repeating my own observations back to me. You can conceivably be noticed in a crowd, but not positively identified.

I don't think "camouflage" fits any definition of what Qanon Shaman was wearing, either in a general sense or in the tactical sense we're talking about here.

so first off, if you are noticed in a crowd but not identified, that might single you out to be pulled from the crowd.

Also if you have a distinctive face paint then your image might be shared more, or just noticed more in the images that are shared to give more opportunities for people to recognize you or to remember your face to be recognized latter.

Also having a distinctive face would make it easier to track in different sets of footage especially when the technique was originally demoed in 2011.

I understand the mechanism you're tracing, but it feels like there's a category error here. Everything you're saying hinges on the circumstantiality of human reaction and interactions, which is extremely hard to model in a credible way and easy to become colored by subjective biases informed by things like TV and movies. Those channels of recognition and reporting that would lead to positive identification, are nebulous idiosyncratic and depend too much on speculation.

It's not to say it wouldn't ever happen, but there's an order of magnitude difference between that and guaranteed positive identification which is what informs the calculated risk.

A hat with infrared LEDs aimed out, such that there was a torus of light around your face. Invisible to humans (generally), only visible to cameras.

It won't "work right" on cameras that have permanent IR filters. Maybe. I haven't tested this in years.

I have a feeling that IR of the correct strength and frequency would be dimly visible to humans, though. Similar to cameras with monochrome night vision via IR LED.

One only needs 1 or two LEDs near their face, but they need to be blinking in short irregular intervals. Cameras have mechanical controls for controlling focus and the amount of light they capture, and that can be attacked with these irregular blinky LEDs that cause the camera to try to adjust to the bright illumination from the LED, but then it is gone before the adjustment is complete, but then it is on again, then off again. The result is a person that never is more than a grey silhouette.

I worked in enterprise FR, on one of the globally leading systems, as the lead developer. That scenario defeats pretty much all FR when from a single camera. It can be mitigated with multiple camera views, which few FR systems are setup for multiple quality views at every key location.

Interesting. I bet a candle-flicker LED or two in series would add a nice bit of random (or psuedo-random LSFR?) AM noise to the IR LEDs.

That would only maybe work for automated tracking; if someone wants to get the image of your face, they should be able to do it in post, unless the recording quality is shitty - the tiny variations in brightness might contain just enough information to reconstruct the face shape with a little filtering.

(Now I wonder, how narrow-band such IR LED is, and if it could be made to emit a single frequency so sharp, it would create funny diffraction patterns off cameras' surfaces and lens imperfections, clobbering the high-frequency components of the image...)

And it is trained FR algorithm specific, so more than useless in the real world where one does not know what FR system is in use.

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