Wearing This T-Shirt And You Are "Invisible" To Every Facial Recognition Camera

Facial recognition might bring lots of conveniences but at the same time, those who do not want to be recognized anywhere will have a hard time avoiding being captured by these cameras.

For a long time, masks have been the go-to option, but recently, a research of the Northeastern University shows a T-shirt with special prints can also do the trick. The best part is, with this method, you do not need to cover your face to hide from facial recognition.

The team of researchers behind this invention have conducted tests with the two most common AI systems for facial recognition and they said the T-shirt successfully shielded the wearer over half of the times.

According to Shelley Lin, a researcher at the Northeastern University, neural networks are powerful tools but they are constantly in danger of adversarial attacks. She also said when you wore the T-shirt, it was highly likely that facial recognition systems will be unable to identify you.

Here is a brief explanation of how the T-shirt works. Before a system can recognize a face, it needs to know that there is a person in the frame it is looking at. The most common way to do so is to draw around objects and people to separate them from the background.

The T-shirt has patterns specially designed to prevent lines being drawn around the wearer. Unable to separate the person from the background, the AI cannot move on the next step of recognizing the wearer’s face.

In tests, the T-shirt fooled two facial recognition systems, Faster R-CNN and YOLOv2 with a success rate from 11% to 63%.

The most pressing issue for the researchers is when the wearer moves, the patterns will be bent and disrupted. So it is challenging to maintain full effect across every frame.

To deal with this problem, the team recorded a person wearing the T-shirt walking in front of the camera. However, on the shirt, they printed the common checkboard patterns we usually see.

When they got the information on how each square was distorted and shifted when the wearer move, they adjust the final patterns according to their analysis.

According to Lin, the team has a long way to go to make the T-shirt works in real life situations because they can hardly know the ways every facial recognition system in the world works.

The team expressed hope that the invention will eventually help companies developing facial recognition to fix loopholes their systems have.

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