Clothing designed to confuse facial recognition software

Projects like this make me think of arms race (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evolutionary_arms_race" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Evolutionary_arms_race</a>).<p>If I wanted my governments surveillance camera system to improve more quickly I&#x27;d confront it with some challenging training data by making an exploit public and available for everyone :)

&gt; KNIT LONG SLEEVE HOODIE €420.00 Sale Price<p>Isn’t that very expensive?<p>Is their goal letting people avoid facial recognition, or is that just a marketing tactic and their goal is to maximize profits?<p>&gt; The algorithm on the textile hinders the object recognition software’s capabilities, causing it to not recognize the person wearing this garment. Instead, it recognizes the textile as nothing, a “zebra”, or a “giraffe”.<p>That’s just inaccurate; it would be more accurate to say: the pattern on the textile may cause some algorithms (which ones? how often?) to misbehave.

The current HN headline [0]makes it clear what this is, but the actual website makes it really difficult to understand what their value proposition is, other than “designed in Italy made from Egyptian yarn”<p>[0] “Clothing designed to confuse facial recognition software”

This seems to have nothing to do with face recognition, but rather misleading the AI to misidentify person as other objects in object recognition task. I like their mission, and I think the design look pretty good. My only concern is that this feature could cause self-driving vehicles to ignore the person wearing it, thus creating a serious safety issue.

This seems to prevent people from being detected by a generic object detector, but it doesn’t seem obvious that it will actually confuse a face detector… it might however confuse an autonomous vehicle, wouldn’t wear this in the street

And, from the other side, we have facial recognition systems resistant to being confused.[1]<p>The more advanced systems mark those people as persons of interest.[2] Then &quot;appearance search&quot; tracks them.[3]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IRF5qSrmqEM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IRF5qSrmqEM</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.avigilon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ai-video-analytics&#x2F;self-learning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.avigilon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ai-video-analytics&#x2F;self-le...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.avigilon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ai-video-analytics&#x2F;appearance-search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.avigilon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ai-video-analytics&#x2F;appeara...</a>

&gt; Cap_able is aimed at a cultural and technological avant-garde that wants to be an exemplary leader in raising awareness of the importance of one&#x27;s rights: a means to express oneself, one&#x27;s identity and the values shared within a reference community.<p>Oh fuck off. Also whoever made that website should go to jail.

Sometimes I wonder how these things actually work (I am not talking of the actual cloth designs or their effectiveness, rather about how they manage to get this level of visibility).<p>This project has been posted nearly everywhere in the last 1-2 years, they made a kickstarter asking (I believe) for US$ 5,000, and they got US$ 5,306 by 36 backers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;capable-design&#x2F;manifesto-collection-by-cap-able" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kickstarter.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;capable-design&#x2F;manifest...</a><p>It was the thesis of the designer at the university, later joined by her sister as a marketer, she seemingly made a very good work at marketing, though thw whole stuff still looks more like an art project than anything else.

For those who closed it because it looked like there is just a &quot;stay tuned&quot; video and a newsletter dialog: The video disappears and a web site appears after you dismiss the newsletter dialog.<p>This is a really cool approach: It looks like slightly flashy but still &quot;normal&quot;-ish clothing, and likely actually works (by confusing the AI into thinking you&#x27;re e.g. a dog).<p>It&#x27;s terrifying that they considered it necessary to get a legal opinion to state that yes, it&#x27;s legal to distribute and wear this.

These clothes make me think of the markings used by butterflies and other animals to ward off predators.

Looks like stuff that Jake Sisko would wear

Ironic (?) that this page comes with a cookie warning.

In the description of the technology in the Collection section they explain that facial recognition systems mistake the patterns on the clothes for animals like dogs, giraffes, and zebras.<p>I don&#x27;t know how this technology works. Is it not possible to train a system to say &quot;human face&quot; or not without accidental identifications of non-humans?<p>Edit: (And thus not be fooled by this?)

The silly colors and patterns will instead attract the attention of people around.<p>Another issue -- it may target specific soft&#x2F;hardware combinations, but will not confuse all of them. It will probably not work against color-agnostic IR or ToF&#x2F;depth cameras.

&quot;The Manifesto Collection&#x27;s intent is not to create an invisibility cloak, rather, it is to raise awareness and protect the rights of the individual wherever possible.&quot; At least they admit that it doesn&#x27;t work.

All this effort would be better put into lobbing for a law to outright ban&#x2F;severely restrict the use of face recognition.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reclaimyourface.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reclaimyourface.eu&#x2F;</a>

I love the initiative, but are there any... less gaudy designs?

The website confused my mobile phone browser.

Well with those prices, organic and fair trade cotton or not, it’s certainly not going to be “for the people.” On the net, privacy will become a luxury fewer people can afford, and that holds true with this apparel as well. Maybe others will follow suit and scale down prices, but for now I wouldn’t pay 400€ for this.

Those Palazzo pants have big Kefka energy

The thing is, the designers of machine learning pipelines can now add these to the training sets

I don&#x27;t know anything about facial recognition software so I&#x27;m probably underestimating the difficulty of alerting the system and it&#x27;s operators to the interesting possibility of giraffes and zebras wandering around the urban environment.

I like the aesthetic - a mix of deep dream and glitchy pixel art.

Can we please stop with this? This will only train the AI and when the AI uprising begins it will already know all tricks.

It seems to be sure face recognition system would catch up with this …

It’s William Gibson’s “Ugly T-shirt” from his novel _Zero History_.

You are better off growing a beard, wearing glasses and a hat.

And there you have your training set

Just wear makeup, cheaper than 420USD