

How to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology - gubatron
http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/07/02/facial-recognition-camouflage/

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lunchbox
One interesting thing I've read is that eyebrows may be more important for
face recognition (by humans) than the appearance of the eyes themselves. (I
suspect this has more to do with the shape of the brow bone than the eyebrow
hair.)

See this example: <http://i.imgur.com/ADXtF.png>

The research was done by Pawan Sinha at MIT.

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Jun8
Interesting, because shaving you eyebrows is easy and is not as conspicuous as
painting your face.

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lunchbox
Sure, or wearing a headband over the eyebrows. But computers probably detect
faces differently, so I don't know if this would fool a computer.

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sesqu
The one system I read about in passing, which was surprisingly accurate, just
looked for off-color blots to the bottom, left and right of a supposed face.
If you're not blonde, eyebrows probably contribute more to the blot than the
pupils.

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1amzave
Or, to avoid detection by cameras entirely, lemon juice:
[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-
anosogno...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-
dilemma-1/)

"But I wore the juice!"

~~~
tomjen3
Cameras can't see the difference between visible light and infrared, so one
thing you could do would be to put a bunch of lnfrared leds on your face -
humans can't see it, but to the cameras your head looks like a light bulb.

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evilduck
I always wanted to do this for my license plate.

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delano
Face paint, seriously? You might fool the software but every person that sees
you will remember you forever.

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baha_man
"Putting paint on your face isn't always practical," he said. "This is just
the way that I wanted to test this. But if you wanted to be covert, you could
try wearing different styles of make-up or accessories. You could position a
Band-aid on the right spot on your face. The power of this idea is that people
can interpret it in their own way."

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delano
He almost had me with the band-aid, but you could only do that once, maybe
twice, per social circle before it became a gimmick.

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dandelany
Reminds me of Pris from Blade Runner: <http://bit.ly/aiM8xZ>

Maybe she was just trying to avoid being recognized :)

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endgame
You don't need to use URL shorteners here, friend:
[http://starsmedia.ign.com/stars/image/article/864/864678/top...](http://starsmedia.ign.com/stars/image/article/864/864678/top-50-chicks-
behaving-badly-the-final-10-20080404021633187-000.jpg)

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astine
This would explain David Bowie.

[http://dailymaily.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/davidbowie001....](http://dailymaily.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/davidbowie001.jpg)

[http://cdn.venturebeat.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/07/face-r...](http://cdn.venturebeat.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/07/face-recognition-makeup.jpg)

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Maciek416
This technique is somewhat reminiscent of Dazzle Camo:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage>

What's interesting is that Dazzle camo is typically used to confuse the visual
systems of human beings, not computer vision, but some of the principles and
tricks seem to be the same.

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baha_man
From the article:

"Harvey said he got his idea from studying camouflage methods use during World
War I and World War II. His project, CV Dazzle, is based on the original
dazzle camouflage used by the military to hide ships in the 1940s."

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justintnt
liquid sky

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gubatron
There's never been a better time to be a creepy stalker.

Back in the beginning when Facebook wasn't stalker friendly I remember wanting
to have auto tagging based on facial recognition. Now... now I'm afraid that
I'll get tagged by other people in facebook (even though I'm not part of it
anymore) and facebook will of course make money by selling all the facial
patterns to third parties.

The applications of facial recognition make my mind fly, they remind me of
Minority Report and marketers recognizing you wherever you go, it makes me
think of even more divorces based on far more evidence that will be
automatically available on social networks.

I think I'll start wearing some make-up a few months from now, or turn my face
away every time I see a camera. The end of anonymity is near.

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jrockway
If you're really concerned, the solution is simple. Don't tell your friends
the same name that you tell the government. If a bunch of people tag you as
"John Smith" on Facebook, and "Bill Smitthers" is the person that is behind on
his back taxes, face recognition with data bought from Facebook is not going
to find you.

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dieterrams
Why'd you assume that the government was his (only) concern?

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jrockway
s/government/whatever/g;

