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The Face Scan Arrives

nytimes.com

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Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#21

Post by Silhouette »

ryusage wrote: post #17
unono wrote: post #6

If VR headsets like Oculus Rift take off, this problem can be mitigated. People will walk around with headsets to cover their entire face, defeating the cameras. Surveillance is going to happen, if you ban government surveillance, the public will get this tech and drones and be doing it anyway. So the robust way to fight it is to plan your life knowing that you can always be monitored and someone will always know whe…

A friend of mine sent me this video just yesterday, showing the feed from a FPV quadcopter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrVLh6r8hd8&feature=player_de... Because it wasn't clear to me at first, I'll just point out that the pilot for this thing is using a VR headset similar to Oculus Rift, and the video is sent back to him over wifi. Supposedly the range is on the order of a mile or so. I didn't even realize this wa…

And so suddenly I've just realized, 10 or 20 years from now, it's not just the police who will be flying these things around.

On the contrary. In a year or two, it might not be just the police. In 10 or 20 years, I expect they will be regulated, a licence will be required to operate one, and they will be required to transmit identifying information at all times. Apply any argument you like that relates to driving on public roads, any argument you like that relates to handling potentially sensitive personal information, or any argument you like to do with navigating crowded airspace.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#22

Post by bsenftner »

wicknicks wrote: post #2

Does anyone know how this can be technically achieved? Large scale face recognition with 1 photo per person in the training set?

Yes, it exists, and I use it every day. In fact, I have a partnership with the DOD/NSA subcontractors who created it, and I have applied the technology to the automated creation of 3D Avatars given a single photo of a person's face. My version of the tech is available at www.3D-Avatar-Store.com. The system works as follows: a person's head is laser scanned, at the same time dozens of single photos are taken of that person from different angles, different lighting conditions, and different quality cameras. Then a neural net is trained to associate each photo with the laser scan data. After a few thousand trainings, anyone's single photo would generate a reasonable likeness of them in 3D. Today, after over a decade of training and 10's of thousands of scans added to the training database, we get remarkably good quality 3D reconstructions given a single photo of anyone, any age, any ethnicity. There are limitations, such as the face needs to be visible, and it needs to be within +/-30 degrees of facing the camera for the 3D reconstruction to be suitable for facial recognition. And that is the point of the original application of this technology: a facial recognition pre-processor. It corrects the face angle and removes any facial expression, creating a likeness of the face in a passport style photo perfect for facial recognition. But, of course, I'm not using it for that. I use it to auto-magically create 3D avatars for video game studios.

Oh, it's really, really fast. My current system is based upon two generations back of neural nets, and they reconstruct from one photo in 0.9 seconds. The latest generation does 144 reconstructions simultaneously given HD video feeds.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#23

Post by buncle »

astrodust wrote: post #19
wes-exp wrote: post #3

As the article says, "Before the advent of these new technologies, time and effort created effective barriers to surveillance abuse. But those barriers are now being removed. They must be rebuilt in the law." Time and effort maintained privacy in the past, by default. However, as technology improves, privacy is no longer the default, so we need to request it, specifically. I hear again and again that "no one cares ab…

Guess it's time for dazzle paint to become a trendy new fashion statement. (Example: http://cvdazzle.com/ ). Someone like Lady Gaga is basically untrackable if she's wearing any of her usual ununsual outfits.

Let me just fetch my meat-suit... and meat-cap.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#24

Post by Silhouette »

marincounty wrote: post #20
unono wrote: post #6

If VR headsets like Oculus Rift take off, this problem can be mitigated. People will walk around with headsets to cover their entire face, defeating the cameras. Surveillance is going to happen, if you ban government surveillance, the public will get this tech and drones and be doing it anyway. So the robust way to fight it is to plan your life knowing that you can always be monitored and someone will always know whe…

1. I know one thing. I am tired of my picture taken whenever I walk into a store. In order to buy a bolt at that mess of a store(the big orange); my picture is taken multiple times. It pisses off customers like myself, and every year for as long as I can remember, the majority of theft is internal. The worst offenders are Management. I think you will see a rise in people wearing desquises? Or, maybe an Indian will ev…

I feel rather similarly about number plate scanning for cars. My local supermarket lost literally £10,000+ when they installed scanners on their car park a while back and we took our custom elsewhere as a direct result. I don't know how much they make in fines, but I expect my family alone cancels out everything they made for a while after introducing the cameras. (And yes, some of that chain's stores did get pulled up for trying to charge fines that weren't justified after installing similar cameras. It made the local paper, with resulting PR about as good as you would expect.)

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#25

Post by CodeCube »

buncle wrote: post #23
astrodust wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess it's time for dazzle paint to become a trendy new fashion statement. (Example: http://cvdazzle.com/ ). Someone like Lady Gaga is basically untrackable if she's wearing any of her usual ununsual outfits.

Let me just fetch my meat-suit... and meat-cap.

haha ... I totally understand that GP didn't mean it this way. But there is something really funny about that statement, as if walking around with a bedazzled face won't make it easy to just say, "the person with the bedazzled face" to describe a very specific person :P

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#26

Post by jerf »

nathan_long wrote: post #16
varelse wrote: post #11

Given the 15.8% success rate of the cat detector on large data sets: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6209.pdf&embedded=true , My chief worry is overconfidence from hopelessly technologically ignorant bureaucrats combined with a slew of false negatives and false positives when applied to human faces on general surveillance feeds. In contrast, driver's license, ID, and arrest photos are at least severely constrained input fi…

I don't know about the cat detector, but Picasa seems able to identify people in photos pretty well, despite varying positions and lighting conditions. It creeps me out. Granted, they are working with the much smaller set of people I know rather than the whole populace. But technology only gets better.

"But technology only gets better."

Technology is bounded by mathematical constraints, though. The more you constrain the number of faces you are scanning and you are looking for, the easier the task is. But when you're trying to pick out any of perhaps thousands of persons of interest across an input set that is, say, in the millions, the more impossible it becomes.

If it helps, imagine that you've equipped a person with all the people they're looking for, and then set them up in front of the cameras. Even if you imagine a superhuman who somehow has time to examine all of the millions of inputs, even the human is going to have a huge number of false positives and negatives. The problem itself is fundamentally, mathematically hard. Any surveillance technique based on the idea that computer vision is better than human vision at this sort of thing is going to fail, hard.

And that's before the population starts taking active countermeasures against the face metrics. (As usual, despite the abundant evidence we live in a dynamic, reactive universe, most humans persist in functioning in a static model, where the Bad Guys will just passively sit and let their faces be scanned and never react to that.)

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#28

Post by unono »

learc83 wrote: post #10
unono wrote: post #6

If VR headsets like Oculus Rift take off, this problem can be mitigated. People will walk around with headsets to cover their entire face, defeating the cameras. Surveillance is going to happen, if you ban government surveillance, the public will get this tech and drones and be doing it anyway. So the robust way to fight it is to plan your life knowing that you can always be monitored and someone will always know whe…

>People will walk around with headsets to cover their entire face, defeating the cameras. You can already obscure all of your face except for your eyes with just a strip of cloth, which will have the exact same effect.

You'll look suspicious, like a ski mask wearing robber. But with headsets, which many people will also be wearing, you won't.

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#29

Post by btbuildem »

astrodust wrote: post #19
wes-exp wrote: post #3

As the article says, "Before the advent of these new technologies, time and effort created effective barriers to surveillance abuse. But those barriers are now being removed. They must be rebuilt in the law." Time and effort maintained privacy in the past, by default. However, as technology improves, privacy is no longer the default, so we need to request it, specifically. I hear again and again that "no one cares ab…

Guess it's time for dazzle paint to become a trendy new fashion statement. (Example: http://cvdazzle.com/ ). Someone like Lady Gaga is basically untrackable if she's wearing any of her usual ununsual outfits.

Except for the part where you're a person wearing a highly unusual outfit..

Re: The Face Scan Arrives

#30

Post by amirmc »

btbuildem wrote: post #29
astrodust wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess it's time for dazzle paint to become a trendy new fashion statement. (Example: http://cvdazzle.com/ ). Someone like Lady Gaga is basically untrackable if she's wearing any of her usual ununsual outfits.

Except for the part where you're a person wearing a highly unusual outfit..

Which the machine won't recognise as a person (and will discard). It would take a human to track you but that's old school. Of course, that's only until gait recognition takes over from face recognition.
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