This stuff looks a little too tame to fool the camera.
From The Guardian, July 17:
Designers
say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance,
their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of
privacy
As
facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public
spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big
fashion trend.
Companies have started
incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully
designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to
exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.
The
designers say advances in computing have made it easier to incorporate
such patterns into commercially viable garments. Experts caution that
the effectiveness of the patterns depends on the surveillance system and
the conditions in which it is used, but Nick Tidball, the co-founder of
the clothing brand Vollebak, thinks “adversarial clothing” could be on
the cusp of going mainstream.
“Anti-surveillance
feelings are so widespread that all it would take is for a single
celebrity to wear one of these garments, currently popular in the
countercultural fashion world, to a high-profile event for it to take
off,” he said.
“So-called ‘adversarial clothing’ wins on many levels. As well as the
practicality of protection, it’s fashionable and fun, it makes a
powerful, public statement that many are in agreement with, it spreads
even more awareness about the importance of privacy and it helps
encourage public debate.”
Unlike traditional CCTV, modern computer vision
systems can identify faces, follow individuals across cameras and search
footage at scale.
Recent advances in
generative AI have made this type of automated identification cheaper
and more widely available to police, retailers and private businesses, an expansion recently warned against by Britain’s biometrics watchdogs, which have called for more laws and a regulator to clamp down on misuse.
Evidence
of misuse and that black and Asian people are more likely to be
incorrectly identified than white people has led to increasing public
concern. A recent poll showed almost 60% of people believed facial
recognition was “another step towards turning the UK into a surveillance
society”.
Dr Jennifer Bell, a senior lecturer
specialising in creative AI, fashion and digital culture at Nottingham
School of Art & Design, said clothing with anti-facial recognition
designs was increasingly available at high street prices and was being
marketed to a wide demographic. “That growing awareness combined with a
lowering of cost often precedes the tipping point towards a real
cultural moment,” she said.
Daniel PreuĆ, the
co-founder of the Urban Privacy clothing brand, said new technology
meant you could now “combine smart, striking style with invisible
protection”.
He emphasised that because surveillance systems
are so powerful, no design can guarantee security from detection, but
said “the added value of fashion is to spread awareness and help
propagate public discourse”.
PreuĆ said his
designs used large-scale prints, asymmetrical cuts and
streetwear-inspired silhouettes to confuse facial recognition
algorithms. The company said its Urban Ghost coat integrates LEDs into
the hood that emit infrared light to dazzle night-vision surveillance
cameras.
PreuĆ, who co-founded his company after reading about the whistleblower Edward Snowden’s
revelations about US surveillance in the Guardian, said his designs
played with the fact that “facial recognition systems freak out when
they see multiple faces at once”.
“Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said.
Bell,
however, said “none of these products are tried and tested, and a lot
of these surveillance technologies can deal with a little resistance …
[but] even if the designs don’t necessarily work perfectly, fashion is
also a visible sign of resistance.
“This is consumers collectively coming together to make a visible statement.”....
....MORE
One way to test it is to walk into a high end casino and time how long it takes for security to come tap you on your shoulder. If it's more than ten minutes you are just making a statement not hiding from the camera
Related July 9 - News You Can Use: "How to hide from killer drones"
And April 2018:
If interested we have a few hundred posts on facial recognition and attempts at defeating same including this oldie-but-goodie from 2018:
Some thought us mad with our focus on countermeasures to the surveillance state. But there was a method to that madness.
We've looked at responses ranging from simple dazzle camouflage back in 2013's
How to Hide From Cameras:
To hairstyles + makeup that confuse facial recognition algos:
...but this raises its own set of problems, not the least of which is
taking a half hour to apply just so you can go down to the lobby.
To Hyperface clothing with thousands of pseudo-facial "hits" that simply overwhelm the computer:
"Anti-Surveillance Clothing Aims to Hide Wearers From Facial Recognition "
From the scholarly stuff such as "
Fooling The Machine: The Byzantine Science of Deceiving Artificial Intelligence".
To, as noted in "
"Magic AI: 'These are the Optical Illusions that Trick, Fool, and Flummox Computers.":
...First though a bit of housekeeping.
Just so you know, I don't actually use the make-up techniques featured
in the earlier posts. Despite the fact they have some efficacy at
fooling the camera they make you look like a moron to human observers on
the street. Better to just put on some glasses and blend into the
crowd.
Can you pick out the Kennedys in this photo?
Here's why we cared: There is big money in this stuff!!
