
A new clothing line confuses automated license plate readers - t23
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614175/a-new-clothing-line-confuses-automated-license-plate-readers/
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visarga
> Fighting against surveillance

So all they would need to do is run an object detection API to put the box on
the car, and only then apply OCR. Car detection is probably 99% accurate. They
can do it with off the shelf implementations of Faster R-CNN or other
architectures. Not to mention that they wouldn't be looking for plate numbers
on the sidewalk, they would point surveillance to the street.

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akersten
They don't even have to go that far... Just query the (existing) database of
plate numbers and throw out anything that isn't in there. Or only run the
detection for objects moving >15mph.

And even without those countermeasures, the junk data hampers mass
surveillance how? It's not really preventing the scanners from reading valid
plates.

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efoto
Feeding the licence plate databases junk is a neat, but rather expensive idea.

Here is link to the recent Defcon presentation:
[https://adversarialfashion.com/pages/defcon-27-crypto-
privac...](https://adversarialfashion.com/pages/defcon-27-crypto-privacy-
presentation)

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siruncledrew
How would these printed designs confuse license readers anymore than other
clothes with 6-8 char text printed on them, like "ADIDAS" or "YEEZYV2"?

Also, why would these readers be scanning sidewalks and people for license
plates? It seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to have a $car or $not_car
image classifier.

~~~
kube-system
As a person with a motorcycle, I’m glad I’ve seen at least two people suggest
only scanning cars :)

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qubex
This reminded me of Gibson’s _Zero History_ (the final part of his Blue Ant
trilogy).

~~~
progre
Kind of the opposite of this though: "The worlds uggliest sweater" was
supposedly programmed into the face recognition systems and would make the
wearer invisable to the cameras. A deliberate backdoor.

