T-Shirt Created That Makes You Invisible To Facial Recognition Technology
Topics: Technology
Anish Vij
Featured Image Credit: Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University/Alamy
Topics: Technology
A bizarre looking t-shirt has been developed to bypass facial recognition systems.
The weird and wonderful patterned top was designed by researchers from Northeastern University and the team were able to identify the areas of the body where adding pixel noise could confuse the AI.
This effectively makes the wearer invisible, from an AI perspective.
Why a regular person would want to do this, is up for another discussion, however, the team argue that the 'creep of digital surveillance' could be avoided, Wired reports, which is pretty cool.
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"The adversarial T-shirt works on the neural networks used for object detection,” explained Xue Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, and co-author of a recent paper on the subject.
Although creating the tech for video surveillance was not without its difficulties.
“For the physical attacks, the real challenge is to remain undetected during the whole video duration,” says Battista Biggio, assistant professor at the University of Cagliari, and creator of the first adversarial example, which was successful in fooling spam email detection.
“When detection is running in every frame, remaining consistently undetected is much harder.”
The t-shirt was created in 2020 and since then, we've had a massive pandemic, which has certainly changed many of out lives.
Sticking to tech though, many Apple users with the newer models - presumably unbothered by AI facial recognition - were complaining about face-ID not working on their phones during the pandemic.
Unlocking your phone by putting in a code is such an effort these days.
However, the tech giant has now offered a solution to some iPhone users.
They said: "With iOS 15.4 and later, you can use Face ID with a Mask to unlock your iPhone while wearing a mask.
"If you're wearing a face mask or potentially other face coverings, Face ID with a Mask can analyse the unique characteristics around your eyes.
"When using Face ID with a Mask, you can still use Face ID to authenticate apps, unlock your iPhone and use Apple Pay.
"This feature is available on iPhone 12 and later with iOS 15.4 and later."
Apple's four step process is: "Make sure that your iPhone has iOS 15.4 or later; Open Settings, then tap Face ID & Passcode; Scroll down and turn on Face ID with a Mask; When prompted, tap Use Face ID with a Mask.
"Follow the onscreen instructions to set up Face ID using the same face scanning process."
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