To be fair, his "photo" looks a lot more like him than my passport photo looks like me. It was taken early in the morning with an ancient camera under fluorescent lights at a post office. I am tinted decidedly green and my eyes look half closed. I look more like an extra on The Walking Dead than an international traveler.
He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person identified by this card looks like this" to an official looking at that card. If he modeled his head well and chose good render settings, it might be truer than a "real photo" in this regard.
> He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are.
That's not true. Your passport photo is supposed to be a snapshot of what you looked like in person at a certain point in time. It is the difference between a registration and a creation.
The likely effect of actions like these is that eventually the passport office will take the photographs to avoid people playing games with the system (such as: replacing the eyes with the eyes of someone else or changing other details that might screw up the biometric passport requirements).
>Your passport photo is supposed to be a snapshot of what you looked like in person at a certain point in time.
Then the photo the Post Office official took fails this test. My skin is not green and my hair is not black. They sure look that way in my passport photo.
The likely effect is that my official "photo" will become an amalgamation of AI facial recognition scans at official checkpoints through time. Perhaps closer to this render than any single photo could be.
That's the scary part. The machine will simply learn to recognize me on sight. The 4th Reich won't have to demand my papers, it will already know me by heart.
> Contactless technology will remove the need for eligible travellers to present a passport to verify their identity in automated immigration clearance.
> The identity of a traveller will be confirmed on the basis of a unique biometric identifier, such as their facial image, instead of document based checks. The live facial image of the traveller at the SmartGate will be matched against an image previously verified as the unique identifier associated with that identity.
> This verified image and others collected during subsequent travel, become the images used by the Department to confirm identity on future travel.
How is minor color distortion comparable to a completely artificial 3d rendering? In the past id photos were taken in completely black and white. But it was still a photograph of that person.
It matters how similar to reality the picture printed on ID looks because it determines the usefulness of this picture.
The process how that picture was obtained doesn't necessarily change the usefulness - a really good pencil drawing may be more accurate and useful than an unlucky photography.
this is actually an interesting subject and one should not jump on quick/easy answers.
- is a photography really a snapshot of what something looks like? seems to be an easy one until you look closely at the history of technology behind photography
- if photography is a faithful representation of something, does it mean there's not "creation" involved? how can photography be considered art if it's not creation?
- "a passport photo is supposed to depict a snapshot of your face" and "all photos are fiction" are not mutually exclusive statements
Every single passport photo I got in china was "touched up" with photoshop to remove the background but also things like hair. This includes the photo I took for my USA passport renewal.
There are legal requirements that are implemented as automated checks by photo booths here so that the photo is made sure to comply, so that official offices don't have to do so. The effect of this regulation is that the expression and lightning is so unnatural that the photo on my ID card only looks like me in a very uncanny way, very similar to that render.
tl;dr: on my ID card I look like my digital psychopathic serial killer brother.
> The likely effect of actions like these is that eventually the passport office will take the photographs
That is the case in Hungary, where I'm from. I was surprised by this the last time I had a passport made. It came out looking good, I was just upset that I had had photos made before because the rules weren't communicated clearly. Other than that, I see no drawbacks.
Loads of Eastern European countries have the passport photo taken by a passport official; the Latvian passports in our family have the best photos, and it nicely bypasses the silly 'provide evidence of your ability to form social bonds in the local community' requirement of UK-derived applications which want you to get a declaration of the true-and-accurate-likeliness of the photo signed on the back.
Countersignatures are mainly intended to confirm a person's name/identity. They certify the photo too, but an adult who hasn't had a passport before needs to attend an interview where the photo will be checked and applicants who do have a previous passport will have the new photo checked against the record.
I do think the countersignature system should be revisited, though.
> Your passport photo is supposed to be a snapshot of what you looked like in person at a certain point in time. It is the difference between a registration and a creation.
This doesn't make any sense. Use a slightly wider or longer lens and you get vastly different pics, and we're not even talking about lighting or other aspects yet.
In Sweden, applications for passports and ID cards are done at a machine that captures your photo, signature and fingerprint digitally and sends it off to manufacturing. These machines are distributed to post offices and embassies abroad.
> Feel free to submit a photo that confuses the biometric requirements, hope you like the automated border gates rejecting your passport
Actually, that seems like a really good idea to avoid being tracked by facial recognition systems. Remove enough detail from your photo so that you can't be identified by a neural net, but can still be identified by a human?
Except, the human will just be told by the computer, "subject does not match passport photo" even though his own eyes say you match, and he'll be bound by duty to treat you as an identity theft. You think border guards are allowed to make decisions? Ha!
I forget the exact number, but the distances between n points on your face is a representation of your face. So we've reduced that to a number too.
I don't think anyone uses the photo for biometric identification. I thought those devices you look at in line simply take a photo of you on entry. In most countries you still face the customs officer who looks at you and your documents.
eGates at UK airports do programmatically allow entry based solely on a facial recognition match between the person standing at the gate and the file on their passport's chip. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
(+ run the passport through a gamut of watch lists and risk profiles)
The border agent, when handed an EU passport, does exactly the same (match the photo to the face) and nothing much more. What exactly is the problem with automating that?
Nope. I left last week and will return on Monday and - just like entering the UK - can confirm that, while there are Customs staff hanging about to make sure nothing goes wrong, they are not individually monitoring each entry/exit.
I find it bloody marvellous. I was on the Heathrow Express literally 20 minutes after getting off the plane from Melbourne. That's how it should be.
In Chile, where I'm from, the institution in charge of identity cards and passports effectively does this, and as far as I'm aware, always has. It doesn't sound weird to me.
To add to this, where is the proof this isn't simply a photo. Where's the proof that the other photos of him on his website aren't fakes / also fakes / touched up.
"Artists" have been known to perform stunts in this vein.
Yeah, I was discussing that with my son over lunch. Even if we have other photos of him on his own website, how is this some sort of objective evidence?
I pulled out my new photo ID received days ago and showed my son the godawful photo on it. We had a good laugh about how it doesn't look like me at all. He could tell because he was looking at me right then while we talked.
I stand by my idea that if you have not seen this person in person, you don't really know how representative it is. My ex husband consistently took hideous photos of me. My sister consistently took charming photos of me. Photos say as much about what is in the mind's eye of the photographer as they do about the subject -- and sometimes more.
Your own passport or ID photos being particularly bad isn't actually relevant to the assertion that this is a good likeness of this man. How do any of us know this is a good likeness of him, other than just taking him at his word?
Thank you, though the only connections I see are "Caucasian male with brown hair." I would not assert based on looks alone that these are the same man. The ID photo is without glasses, but the video shows him in glasses. The video is 3/4 view of his face for most of the time whereas the ID photo is head on.
I'm surprised passport offices don't care more about photo quality. I submitted a reasonably clear photo with good contrast correct colour balance, and the image on my UK passport (both printed and on the chip) is blurry, washed out, and badly tinted yellow/green.
I guess they scanned it in with crappy settings and didn't care enough to fix it.
To be fair, if you see what they turn it into on the card itself, "quality" is not a selecting criterium. It's pretty much purely "contrast" and "framing" to make sure your entire face ends up on the fact, with enough contrast that a two-tone presentation still looks vaguely recognizable.
In Sweden an artist painted a self-portrait, took a photo of it, and used that photo when renewing his driver's license. It was accepted. [0] The transport agency, when told about this afterwards, had no problem with it as it was -- in that small size anyway -- indistinguishable from a normal photo (but they discouraged others from trying the same). [1]
It would be quite difficult to find something that would both be invisible and survive the process of being printed out onto the card, especially as you'd only have one shot at getting it right!
> For example - why would a 3D model based on high-quality photogrammetry be any less "real" than a digital photograph.
Because it isn't. It shows that you can get a digital ID based on the photograph of an entity that technically never existed, it's a texture map around human shaped blank, not a photograph of a human. You can bet that to the authorities this is a real problem.
What's important is a controlled process that attaches this photo to a hard-to-forge token, such as a passport or other identity document. It confirms that some designated clerk looked at the photo and at the person, and also at other documents confirming the identity of that person, and maybe asked questions to make sure the person is who (s)he alleges to be.
That photo is for reference only, and is worth next to nothing without the identity verification process above.
You're talking to the guy that pioneered digital photos used for identification purposes in 1985 (Goodsports, Alphabet BV, Amsterdam).
I think I know a thing or two about the processes involved to get a pass on being allowed to use digital imagery as proof of identity, the one thing that everybody involved from the official side was quite clear on was that any kind of tampering with the image content was absolutely forbidden.
So I would expect this piece of art to have some far reaching consequences.
Any tampering is forbidden right? Even the transposition of a pixel is forbidden - it's technically illegal, but as long as it doesn't make a difference then I don't think anybody is going to care - so what if this pixel is cyan in this picture and turquoise in the other.
When things are really going to hit the fan is if you are able to have a digitally altered picture that passes the eye test for visual verification but is useless somehow for facial recognition algorithms (altered facial proportions, etc etc). That's a big if, because I don't know much about facial recognition technologies, I'd suspect they're born from machine learning technologies based for human curated results.
Yes, this is correct. And that's exactly what this opens the door to. I suspect this will lead to some changes in the law regarding what route an image should take to be acceptable. It's been converging on this for a long time with ever more strict rules about what can and can not be in the picture. The list of requirements is quite long. It's a small step from there to having the passport office make the photograph.
> Yes, this is correct. And that's exactly what this opens the door to.
I don't quite understand what you mean. I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened. Only if a digitally altered picture can pass both a visual clerk test and facial recognition software will this be considered a problem.
Also, everything is still pointing towards having the passport office make the photograph. Right now post offices do have picture taking facilities - I think that if you just prevented people from taking their own to the post office, or made them take the picture at a place that never let you take possession of the photograph, that would be roughly equivalent. Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.
> I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened.
This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity. Even compression artifacts were 'out', this posed some very interesting challenges in controlling the laser printers available at the time to output grayshades (which they really did not want to do), early attempts at dithering did not meet the required standards.
> Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.
Interestingly enough, my partner at the company that I worked for in the 80's (and who is technically retired) has just started up a new company to make those pictures with your smartphone.
> This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity
I guess I didn't make my question clear enough which is why that sort of integrity matters. Is it just in response to government legislation that has nothing to do with the usefulness of the ID, or is there some sort of measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ID if that sort of integrity is not followed?
A crappy photograph with no compression artifacts is arguably a worse form of ID than a very well taken image that has compression artifacts. And with an extra layer of lamination and holographic images superimposed across the pictures, why is that allowed but discreet photo manipulation isn't? Is it just that the government doesn't fully understand technology so just knee-jerk bans all of it, or is there an actual basis for the suspicion of such things leading to bad identification?
The integrity matters because anything other than that is considered a falsification. It's a legal requirement, not a technical one. Of course you could flip a LSB in some grayscale image and get away with it. But from a legal point of view you've just done something that is not allowed.
It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal, and the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.
So this new model might lead to additional legal changes, but the main changes a customer might see is that if the government decides it was wrong and decides on another definition of "falsification" (not likely) or the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.
> It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal
That goes for all laws.
> the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.
No, the law is embodying many years of experience with people attempting to forge IDs. So 'tampering' with the inputs to the process is tantamount to forgery, it makes good sense and it draws the lines in an extremely clear and non-ambiguous way. Far better than to leave some vague statements open to interpretation about what manipulation is allowed and what not (fun bit: people asking the service if we can edit out their wrinkles...).
> the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.
In some places they do this, you get a certificate of authenticity with your passport photographs that you have to hand in to the officials.
That sounds just fine to me. It's currently a stressful process of trying to follow all the composition requirements and hoping they don't reject it. Might as well have them do it themselves. More work for whoever has to take the photo, less work for everyone else.
Nobody uses pictures for identification. Not alone. In combination with everything else, maybe, but being French, I can even assure you that in most of the cases, people don't even look at your photo when checking your ID. They're always outdated, took in a weird lightning, and with a terrible quality.
From an administration point of view, whether you took a picture of your face and mapped it onto a 3D model, or just gave them the original picture makes zero difference. Last time I renewed my card, I gave them four years old pictures, I looked totally different, and they do not give a damn.
Identification through only a picture was dumb in 1985, and still is.
Whether it is dumb or not does not matter. The facts are that biometric passports with pictures and fingerprints are the law of the land in a lot of places.
That you got away with giving them four year old pictures is good for you, I tried and was refused (and had to go make new pictures). And I haven't changed all that much (the giveaway I guess was that the picture was the same as the one I gave them last time when I applied for a passport).
When making ID cards for my children, I was too lazy to also apply for a passport at the same time. Applied a few weeks later and the photos got rejected because they were the same as the ID ones. According to the clerk, they can be identical only when both submissions are on the same day.
In the UK, when I renewed my driving license online I was offered the option to have them pick up the photo from my passport record, rather than send in a new photo.
Since the passport had been issued about 9 years before, the new driving license contained a picture already 9 years old (and identical to the passport).
Nearly ten years later (nearing expiry), it therefore contains a photo about 19 years old. I like to think I still look like that youthful person, of course.
To me, this is really not that weird. Law enforcement can put up "wanted" posters based on an artist's sketch. So there is already a way that governments rely on a synthetic image for identification purposes.
Of course that is only for preliminary identification, but then this is a more accurate representation than a sketch.
A photorealistic color painting might be just as good for identification purposes as a photograph, though it might be easier to tell it was done by hand. As long as it looks "like you" (according to other fallible humans!) then it does its job.
I knew a guy who had a black-sheep-ish twin brother. He was starting to turn his life around, but then stole his brother's ID and did a bunch of shit. We were like, "wait why would he steal your ID--oh yea..duh...you're twins"
A friend of mine and his brothers once (allegedly) traveled around South America on a single driving license. They look sufficiently similar to the photo and I'm guessing they weren't checked often.
This is a perfect example of the uncanny valley for anyone not familiar with the concept. It's just beyond the threshold enough to make the viewer feel as if something's off.
I can't tell. And I used to be pretty good at spotting fake stills but this is beyond my ability to discern, what specifically makes you feel 'something's off'?
Shadows near the neck area, very similar to what most ambient occlusion algorithms would give.
Hair has a shine that would almost never happen unless you dumped an entire bottle of shampoo on your head for a week straight. It also just sinks right in, no pores, nothing.
Texture quality is still a bit low,especially on the forehead. Normal maps are off (or not there at all), so there's no bumps and crevices there. Skin is blurred (but that may be a compression artifact)
And of course, the blur feels extremely unnatural. Especially knowing the shitty photomatons 99% of people use to get their pictures taken for official purposes, they'll never have such a focus on the face and blur everything out.
Is there no confirmation under penalty of perjury that the image provided was a photograph (and not just a likeness)? Or, is it as he claims, satisfactory according to the requisite standards?
"Artist uses a blog post to provide evidence of government falsifying documents."
The criteria (online at https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F10619) talk explicitly about photos. They also say it has to be taken by a professional or in a photo booth certified by the government. IANAL, but I wouldn't build on that defense.
I think this is the first time when I almost thought that this is a photograph not 3D model. The facial features are almost life-like, but then you look up and look at the hair line and you realize what you're looking at. Still mind-blowing, at least to me, how close we are to modeling 3D models of humans indistinguishable from real-life.
The US passport system has you bring in your own photos as well. I wonder if the various law enforcement facial recognition databases account for the potential of people altering photos...changing the distance between eyes, nose, etc. Of course, end users can't alter mug shots.
Maybe this is a feature rather than a bug. Hypothetically you could create a representation of yourself that works for humans to recognize you, but not for facial recognition systems.
I tried that, to fool the bus' facial recognition system (they want to keep known assholes out, or at least that's currently the intended purpose (or at least that's what they say)), but you need to go really far before most algorithms don't recognize your face as a face anymore.
This is too boring. Out here in 'radical' India, we have Aadhar 'unique ID' (tm) for such diverse specimens as trees and cows (and fully equipped with biometrics like fingerprints and Iris).
As a complete aside, google translate is incredible. Until I started reading the same thing again, I didn't even realize the page was french. And even then, I thought the second section was the translation, not the first!
He claims the photo is a "fiction". All photos are. The photo's job is to say that "the person identified by this card looks like this" to an official looking at that card. If he modeled his head well and chose good render settings, it might be truer than a "real photo" in this regard.