Adversarial Fashion Makes a Statement on AI Panopticon | Hacker News Reader

Adversarial Fashion Makes a Statement on AI Panopticon

spectrum.ieee.org

113 pointsrbanffy50 comments

There is a weak component to facial recognition systems that can be exploited to make one invisible to facial recognition, but you stick out like a sore thumb to people. The exploit is to not have a human face, meaning the regular pattern of two eyes centered above a nose and mouth. The exploit is as simple as placing a sticker of a 3rd eye, a 2nd nose, or any other facial feature that is "not human" and you will be invisible to facial recognition. The reason this works is because the initial test for finding faces in images is a weak test, it has to be fast because it has to evaluate every possible rectangle in a video frame. That test is looking for the regular human pattern of a human face, and it that test passes that rectangle get more investigation. Failing that initial test, that rectangle is invisible...

Sounds like you're describing Viola–Jones, which is from 2001. Have you tried this strategy of a third eye or similar using modern face detectors?

Nope, not Viola–Jones. I'm describing the initial fast test that is a preprocessor to pretty much all facial recognition, before the FR model processes anything. FR models process potential face rectangles, and this method goes after the preprocessing. This works on all the top FR models. I wrote one of the global top 5, with over a decade running as certified by the annual NIST FR Vendor's Test.

> but you stick out like a sore thumb to people

Good point. When I pass by the security at the airport they force me to take off my hat. Something covering my face would not be taken lightly.

Perhaps a tattoo then.

Hmm. I wonder how long till we can implant little lights or color changers in our skin, like a moving tattoo that change color based on some wireless code we send, or special light we shine on them, so that you could essentially add or subtract facial features every couple of minutes.

I think if we could get the tech figured out it would be a big hit. People love tattoos, but the unchangability makes them disagreeable for me.

Oh, you bring up the 2nd method that defeats facial recognition, and it is a similar exploit that attacks a weakness in the technology chain. Remember "Ed Hardy" that god awful fashion from around 2013 where clothing had graffitti, sequins, and flashing LEDs? You now love that fashion and bring it back, because those little flashing LEDs, if close to your face, and flashing at irregular intervals cause the nearby face to become silhouetted. The reason is the flash overwhelms the light sensor, causing the light aperture to adjust, but that adjustment is out of sync with those flashing LEDs. The LEDs and their irregular flash cause the lighting aperture to be constantly adjusting and never quite correct. You'll b seen by facial recognition, but the image quality will be nearly useless. Blinky LEDs on eyeglass frames are a perfect location, as well as the brim of a hat.

The lights don’t even need to be too visible. Many of the cameras used for face recognition don’t have IR filters.

Would an eye patch work? Maybe a flesh colored one?

No, people with missing eyes and eye patches are in the training data.

Anyone else think of "A Scanner Darkly" movie with the interpolate mask that transitions between different faces as the means for better Adversarial Fashion?

Wouldn't one be able to use a hyper real mask to create false evident to frame someone? People are so blind in trusting AI that innocent people are being left in jail were primitive detective work would prove they were not he culprit. [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/01/innocent-...

I hope designs like this become easier to purchase soon. It'd be fun to experiment with cameras I've got access to and I'd totally wear it out places on the weekend.

Totally get that it's a cat-and-mouse thing, but I don't mind making more work for the people trying to force this on us all.

At some point there might be a DMCA-like law that makes such adversarial clothing illegal.

They've made covering your face illegal in lots of places before the pandemic made it obligatory. We had protests here where people wore masks and masks were swiftly banned. It's ok for police though.

I would expect it to be covered under any existing laws about circumventing security systems or impeding law enforcement. A more specific law would probably pass in this environment though.

That was my first thought too.

Remember to change the location of the marbles in your shoes frequently to avoid adaptive gait recognition

Face detection on the example images immediately focused on the right part and after that recognition becomes much easier when you crop out the rest. Not convinced. It’s a cool gimmick though. I like the MARPATish look of the black and white one.

The most effective socially acceptable mechanism is a burqa or COVID mask or motorcycle helmet sock.

As Phil Zimmerman might opine, it’s not so much about defying every attack, it’s moreso about making it more difficult en masse by increasing the unit cost. Though perhaps in the 90s surveillance tech wasn’t quite scaling as quickly as it is now.

Sock masks are actually kinda discreet with the right clothing.

> Sock masks are actually kinda discreet with the right clothing.

Which kind of clothing are you talking about?

Are Juggalos still undefeated? [1]

[1] https://www.codastory.com/surveillance-and-control/juggalo-p...

just like cvdazzle before it, this is bound to do bugger all one model into the future, and in the meantime you'd still really want to stick a pebble in one shoe and wear platforms or something to mess with gait analysis

you should read this less as convincingly adversarial fashion and more fashion inspired by the vague concept of computer-vision-aided surveillance, which, mind you, is still pretty rad, just more vogue material, less ieee spectrum material

These garments need to function in both visible and infrared environments as cameras use both. Otherwise these are not serious.

I don’t know how effective these are but it’s kinda not the point to me, the point of the clothing is a loud statement saying “I’m not okay with being surveilled all the time it’s normal and okay to to feel that way”

Works for cars, too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znaA091_8-M

It’s great how with the clothing and the cars, what makes you harder to detect with AI makes you an incredibly easy to detect, garish clown to everyone else.

Yeah so like that XKCD, the cops have a post-it in their car with your details. But like fashion it's also making a statement.

I'm pretty sure adversarial fashion hoodies are something you would only wear if your aim was to stand out. Porch thieves just pull their cap low and look at the ground while nicking your package.

Simple baseball hat is one of the oldest tricks in the book and is a staple for a reason. The brim blocks your eyes and upper half of your face, facial recognition gets broken because the camera cannot find two eyes and a nose bridge, and the biggest one over these ridiculous patterns, zero suspicion. It's not weird to wear a hat, but you stand out immediately wearing any of these adversarial patterns.

Granted, a hat will not trick "person" detection, you'll still get picked up in the box, but any camera that records with motion will still detect you in the adversarial pattern too as a person, even if it doesn't pick up your face to ID you.

If I were up to anything nefarious, I'd rather blend in with other humans as much as possible, not stand out like a sore thumb.

Nah these designs can never proliferate very far because you can EASILY train AI to recognize the difference between these patterns and an actual face.

You need to make a hoodie covered with actual size faces. That will fool the AI and will be harder to account for. Use AI itself to generate these faces so every hoodie has unique faces. Then imagine everyone in a crowd wearing this.

Boom. THAT will fool AI for long time. But let's not fool ourselves... AI can eventually even be trained to recognize this. But it buys us a bit more time before the end.

Projects like this pop up multiple times per year. Mostly one off student project, sometimes famous designers. Its such low hanging fruit that wont change anything. Better start teaching politics in art school?

Here you go: https://www.wish.com/product/actor-nicholas-cage-3d-all-over...

It will always be a cat-and-mouse game. I don't think it's possible to have any sort of visual that an algorithm can't be trained to recognize.

sidenote: did Adversarial Fashion stop selling the ALPR shirts/hoodies? That was my favorite thing to wear years back. And they're probably still effective at inserting noise.

Gait analysis - good luck faking your gait.

What we need is a legislative solution to street surveillance proliferation. Germans figured that one out, rest of the world is capable of doing it too.

A pebble in one shoe will change your gait.

"Oh look, its that asshole that puts rocks in his shoes again"

Gait detection can’t detect a pebble in a shoe, it just detects a different gait. Depending on which side and the location in the shoe, you could have many unique gaits. Nobody will be noticing that you have a pebble in your shoe, and if someone managed to notice that you have different gaits all the time they would probably say something like “oh there’s that guy who always shows up as someone new.” If they notice.

It would be great if a lot of people did this regularly just to throw off the data.

Nothing a dress that touches that ground cant help obscure.

You need a system that does gait analysis, which requires upgrades across the board. All those sunk costs on pervasive facial recon systems. Sucks teeth.

We all get Segways, problem solved.

This seems Like something that happens every 6 months or so. Maybe fashion isn’t really protest?

There is a lot irony in using AI to generate adversarial examples for AI object segmentation.

Why? If you complete the loop it's just a GAN.

Emphasis on the adversarial

i dont think this works but i do think the patterns look really cool. its like a hawaiian shirt but worse. im lowk obsessed i lowk will be purchasing once i have the funds.

> statement logged. standing by.

Finally, I can blend in.

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Excellent, this will allow me to disappear completely!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com