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 Preuß, 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”.
Preuß 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.
Preuß, 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:
ICYMI: The Most Valuable AI Start-up Inthe World Does Facial Recognition
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:
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.
Here's why we cared: There is big money in this stuff!!
